ReadWriteWeb

Most experts agree that Google won't make us stupid. Indeed, 76% of technology stakeholders and critics interviewed by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University believe that the Internet and search engines will enhance human intelligence by 2020.

A couple of years ago, the new launch from Webwalks, a universal inbox, news aggregator, password manager and kitchen sink-type application would have caught my eye. I'd rush out to try it, merging my multiple accounts under its one roof then wait to see how well my life improved, how much time I saved. But today, I'm more ambivalent about these sorts of applications. The concept of a universal inbox for tracking everything under the sun now leaves me cold.

That's not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea - Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook's new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there's a key difference between these apps and those promising a "universal inbox" - they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) just gave Google the clearance to buy and sell energy in bulk. While it's interesting to speculate if Google wants to sell energy to consumers, the company has already declared that it has no plans to sell energy to consumers or to speculate in energy markets. Instead, Google says that it wanted this authorization from FERC in order to manage its own energy supplies better.

Do you remember that terrible yearbook picture of you, with the feathered hair, two-inch thick Coke bottle glasses and braces? (Don't even mention the giant forehead zit.) That one? It might be coming back to haunt you.

TechFlash reported this week that Classmates.com has an "ambitious plan" to digitize high-school yearbooks and offer them on the site.

Your phone can translate foreign language text just by looking at it through Google Goggles. A South Korean telecom has released a product similar to Google Goggles. The social content Augmented Reality mobile browser junaio will have a new version released at SXSW next month and there's now an 8 minute video from TED available detailing Microsoft's plans for Bing, including Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality (AR), the practice of displaying data on top of our view of the world around us, is hot stuff. Below are the top stories on AR from around the web over the past 24 hours, selected with help from OneSpot. Watch this space: ReadWriteWeb will be releasing a research report on the use of AR for marketing very soon.

Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use #samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you're tweeting about.

Is there any business Google doesn't want to be in? Despite the fact that there are already plenty of excellent mobile shopping applications for the Android smartphone operating system, Google has decided to launch their own. Via an announcement on the Google Mobile blog, we're introduced to the search giant's latest creation: Google Shopper. If you're at all familiar with mobile shopping applications, then you can probably guess what this app does. It scans barcodes and retrieves prices. It can also find product information using photos snapped with your phone's camera. You can do voice searches, too. Apparently, Google didn't want to make just another mobile shopping app, they wanted to make a better one. 

Google Maps is a great program, but it's always been disappointing to see where in the world it doesn't offer much coverage. Today the Google Africa blog announced that local business data has been added for 30 countries in Africa.

"As well as searching online Maps for towns, highways, or roads," Joe Mucheru and Jarda Bengl of Google wrote today, "Google Maps users can now find local businesses. This could be a burger place in Lagos, a garage in Kampala, a hairdresser in Accra or an airport shuttle in Dakar."

We just received confirmation from Google that Google Reader now consumes PubSubHubbub feeds in real time. Until now, it often took half an hour or longer before new posts from popular blogs and news sites would appear in Google Reader. Now, however, posts from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds (including our own RSS feed) have started to appear in Google Reader almost immediately after they are published.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, digital advertising development studio Inition brought augmented reality (AR) to the games with a promotion they produced for Samsung which gave users a unique look at a new device from the company. With thousands of people flocking to Vancouver for this year's Olympics, the games have again taken to augmented reality for some unique and immersive marketing opportunities.