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Earlier this week, we were lamenting about Bebo's lack of innovation in the online social networking space. Here it was 2009 and they were only just now releasing tools that would help take Bebo mobile. Once again, it looked like Bebo was following the industry leaders...and doing so far too late. But now it seems Bebo may have something up their sleeve that's going to make us eat our words. Apparently, the company is planning a major reinvention of their social network which may have us giving them a second look.

You've done the market research. You've built the killer app. Now, all you need is a decent domain name. Preferably a .com. Why? Because the iPhone doesn't have a .net button, for one thing. But finding something short and memorable can be difficult at best. Enter Domain Pigeon, a domain search service that eschews one-at-a-time searches by allowing you to thumb through a laundry list of available domains - including the five-letter .com domains that are still available.

Google added a new feature to Gmail Labs today: Multiple Inboxes. Created as a 20% time project by Google's Octavian Costache, this new feature allows you to expand your standard Gmail inbox with additional panes. The name 'Multiple Inboxes' is misleading, however. In reality, this new feature gives you something akin to multi-pane viewing, with your main inbox on the left and up to five other 'inboxes' on the right. These additional inboxes can display anything from searches, to mail with a specific label or from a certain sender.

Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation, something that many OpenID advocates have hoped would happen for some time. The two systems of logging in to distributed websites, OpenID and Facebook Connect, have been characterized as rivals - OpenID being the high-minded but socially awkward one who doesn't get invited to parties despite being a really good person and Facebook Connect being the rich preppy popular kid from the 80's movie who's a bully but is good at sports.

Now they've joined forces, on some level. Cynics immediately said it would make no difference, that their cynicism remained unchanged, or that Facebook was likely to "pull a Microsoft" and try to destroy OpenID. We disagree. We think this is good news. Here is why.

IBM, Google Health and a consortium of medical device makers and other companies announced today that they have created a software platform that will allow medical data from at-home devices like glucose meters and blood pressure monitors to be sent automatically to Google Health or other Personal Health Records systems online. It's a broad reaching software platform that will bring data portability and medical records interoperability in direct conflict with a huge industry entrenched in siloed data.

If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

Google has made a tradition of tweaking its logotype in honor of holidays, special events, and celebrations. And that tweaking has resulted in a library of interesting interpretations of "Google." Now, they're giving school age children the chance to participate in the fun and win some cash with the "Doodle 4 Google" contest. What are they up against? Let's take a look back at 30 of our favorite Google Doodles over the years.

Today, Donald B. Verrilli was appointed to the position of associate deputy attorney general by President Obama. While he is definitely not a household name, Verrilli was the lawyer who represented the music industry in the Grokster case in the U.S. Supreme Court. This appointment by itself wouldn't necessarily stand out, but the Obama administration has now appointed a handful of pro-copyright industry insiders to prominent positions in the Department of Justice, including Tom Perrelli, who was one of the RIAA's top lawyers.

Baynote is one of a number of recommendation technology providers which licenses its product to commercial companies. As we'll see in this article, Baynote places particular emphasis on real-time user behaviors - which Baynote claims goes beyond Amazon's "first generation" approach to recommendations. One thing that we've discovered so far in our series on recommendation engines is that every company in this market - including those which create their own platform, like Amazon and Netflix - have differing approaches and ideas on what makes a good recommendation engine. We spoke to Baynote founder and CEO Jack Jia, to find out why he believes their approach trumps Amazon.

If you spend time on the mobile web, you know there's certainly no shortage of content already available on our phones. What if you're on the run and get a hankering for some classic literature though? Enter the just released Google Book Search Mobile at books.google.com/m.

It's a very handy new version of the site that lets you search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser. Regular Google Book Search users know that these books are all scanned in as images, but for the new mobile version Google has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to grab the text on the pages. The whole system works quite well.

Just last week, Google announced offline support for Gmail, and today, Google Calendar is also finally getting a similar upgrade. Google Apps users are the first to get access to this new feature, though we assume that Google will roll this out to all of its users soon. The offline feature was built on top of Google Gears, which is available for Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer on Windows, Mac, and Linux.