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Foursquare has released a new Web version of its Explore tab at foursquare.com/explore. The mobile version of Explore, which launched last March, is for finding stuff to see and do nearby. Today's release of Explore for the Web helps with planning interesting things to do from the desktop or iPad.

In its announcement of Explore for the Web, Foursquare says its mission is "adding an 'interesting' layer to the whole world, tailored just for you." Foursquare Explore draws on the check-ins, tips, lists and interests of your friends to put a layer of "interesting" - which is apparently a noun at Foursquare - on a map. This is a challenge to Google Places and Maps, which is racing to add "interesting", but Foursquare's 1.5 billion check-ins give it a strong position.

Google announced this morning that it is taking the inclusion of social recommendations in its search results a step further with the introduction of the long-awaited Google +1. The new feature puts a "+1" icon next to each search result, allowing users to recommend certain results and websites directly from Google, rather than on Twitter or Facebook.

Google calls the feature "digital shorthand for 'this is pretty cool'," but we have to wonder - who are you telling and why?

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said last summer. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

What should you be doing next? A former Googler named Jyri Engeström, whose microblogging service Jaiku was cooler than Twitter, but was acquired into oblivion by Google three years ago, now thinks he can beat Google to the punch on that question. His new service Ditto launches today (iPhone app). It aims to use social suggestions, structured data and your existing Twitter and Facebook social graphs to recommend places and activities to fullfill your every desire.

Google announced this weekend that it has developed a car that can drive itself. A small fleet of the vehicles has logged more than 1,000 miles of entirely automated driving and 140,000 miles of driving with only occasional human intervention.

It's a development of historic significance: few events have changed the experience of life on earth as much as last century's proliferation of hundreds of millions of automobiles. The automobile was a revolution in personal autonomy, but it came with great costs. Now we've entered an era when that personal autonomy will become automated and some of the automobile's costs could be mitigated as a result. As a technologist, I find it helpful to understand the emergence of the fabled self-driving car as a convergence of three trends: the Internet of Things, Big Data and Real-Time Technology. Those trends are poised to go far beyond a self-driving car.

Typing a search query into Google.com is such old news. Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a much-hyped keynote talk at Berlin's IFA home electronics event today and said that his vision for the future of search looks very, very different.

Schmidt says he believes that in the future, your mobile phone will quickly and automatically deliver personalized information to you based on your physical location and interests. "Since you are in location X right now, and have interest Y, Google thinks you'd like to know information Z," the search giant will effectively say to your phone.

Apple acquired the military-technology spin-off, mobile personal assistant app called SIRI this Spring, but SIRI isn't the only consumer startup cut from the cloth of the $200 million DARPA investment in an artificial intelligence project called CALO.

The next SRI/CALO app to launch may be TrapIt, a news feed reading and recommendation service designed to act as a "cognitive prosthetic" to "adapt to unexpected events" in situations of "intense information overload". The US Navy has used the core technology TrapIt is based on to parse through huge quantities of information for what's most relevant. Soon you'll be able to use it to find the best news about your obscure interests, in the web's otherwise overwhelming ocean of Justin Bieber references. The spin-off company has lots of high-profile backing (including Li Ka-shing), will launch later this or early next year and we've got the first screenshots below.

Hunch was never a social Q&A service, though many press outlets have confused it for one. The service, founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and super-hot angel investor Chris Dixon, has relaunched its home page and is now more clearly positioned than ever as a taste-graph driven recommendation engine. That might sound confusing, but the new home page is actually drop-dead simple.

Log in with your Twitter or Facebook account, answer as few as 20 quick and addictive taste-evaluation questions, and Hunch will turn the front page of the site into a list of highly targeted personal recommendations of movies, books, magazines, computers, meals, vacation destinations and more. It's really impressive.

Although a majority of folks might still rely on traditional means such as the radio to discover new music, the competition is constantly heating up in the online music discovery realm, with services like Pandora, The Hype Machine and Last.fm always looking to recommend that next song or artist.

Today, YouTube is getting into the music recommendation and discovery game with an update to its music page.

Facebook just announced the availability of a new feature for users creating accounts on the social network: Suggested Interests. Facebook will now recommend that new users sign up for updates from ("Like") publishers with high reader engagement and subscribed-to by people demographically similar to themselves. That's a unique combination of factors that only Facebook could offer.

If this intersection of 3 key social software trends is someday exposed more fully to all 500 million Facebook users and more - the Facebook vs. Google battle could become a fight between Recommendation and Search. Facebook recommendations are in the sidebar for most users today, but they are so powerful that it's worth betting they'll be center stage in the future.

Fanit is another start-up that has discovered the gospel of game play and is using it to promote their music recommendation experience.

Fans support their favorite artists and bands by purchasing badges. 100% of the money for the badges go to the artists, according to the company's PR representative. As the fan purchases badges and engages in recommendation actions, they earn "rank." That rank gives the fan a chance at "superfan" status and, according to the company, creates opportunities for interactions with the listener's favorite musicians.