Gas 2.0

I’ve got to say, this story strikes home with me; I’ve been repeatedly ignored by Twitter’s “customer service” every time I’ve tried to engage them about parked twitter handles. Now it appears that some major auto manufacturers are considering legal action to get Twitter to deal with username squatters in an attempt to protect their brand names.

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In preparation for the 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference next month, MIT is rolling out a pilot program in Copenhagen that will allow the city’s biking residents to exchange social information and share their relative positioning with each other via the internet using GPS, cell phones, smart tags and a self-organizing system.

The program, called “SmartBiking,” encourages bikers to interact in novel ways including through a Facebook app called “I crossed your path.”

According to Christine Outram, the principal research assistant on the project, the Facebook app creates a “social network for cyclists, allowing them to link up with people they may have ridden past during the day and potentially establish new connections.”

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The Green My Ride Facebook App

Huddler.com, the new green community of crowd-powered product reviews (and other good stuff), just released a new Facebook app that gives you yet another excuse to avoid what you really should be doing.

Green My Ride has a simple premise: start out as a gas guzzling, flower crushing monster vehicle, and by earning credits through various actions (below), you can earn more efficient cars (up to a solar-powered electric car) to display on your Facebook profile. Read the rest of this entry »