CROWD SOURCED CONSTITUTION SUBMITTED TO ICELAND'S GOVERNMENT FOR APPROVAL

A committee of 25 Icelanders submitted the first draft of a rewritten constitution to the country's parliamentary speaker Friday. The democratic experiment bravely asked citizens to log on to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter to engage with the committee in a discussion about the nation's future.

While the project's Facebook page played host to pleads for free ice cream and more volcanoes, the constitution's creators managed to stay on task, focusing on issues of decentralization and transparency in government. The draft is slated for review beginning October 1st.

LEAK: TWITTER TO ANNOUNCE PHOTO SHARING SERVICE THIS WEEK

Twitter will announce a photo-sharing service at the D9 conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., this week, according to sources familiar with the matter. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is set to speak at D9 on Wednesday. Twitter spokespeople did not reply for a request for comment on the matter.

Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets. Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.

GOOGLE UPDATES SOCIAL SEARCH DATA WITH TWITTER, YOUTUBE AND FACEBOOK INFO

Google first rolled out their Social Search feature back in 2009, but they’ve just announced a substantial update that will more fully integrate your social search results into normal search results. Now when you view a search results page, your search results will be annotated if they have been shared or liked by your friends… and your search results will even be directly influenced now by how many of your friends have shared and linked a given page.

This is very different than the way Google Social Search used to work: back in 2009 when they service first launched, social results were placed down at the bottom of the page and mainly showed results friends had shared and linked through their Google profiles, a la Google Reader.

Now, however, Google’s plucking their social search data from a bigger ecosystem that includes Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. If someone you’re connected to on any of these sites has shared a link, that link may now show up higher in your results, with an annotation made by that person showing up right beneath the results.

“With these changes, we want to help you find the most relevant information possible, personalized to your interests and the people you care about,” says Google.

The new update will begin rolling out to users today, although it’ll start just in Google’s English results, and it might take a week for you to start seeing your friends’ social sharing habits popping up in your search results.

Needless to say, the new Social Search will only work if Google knows who you are by searching after you’ve logged into your Google account.

HIGHER RESOLUTION PHOTOS COMING TO FACEBOOK

Facebook photos have been notoriously poor quality.  Between the extremely high compression and very low resolution, that cute baby picture you upload is reduced to a blurry postage stamp.  Over the next few weeks Facebook will begin rolling out support for high resolution pictures.  According to Facebook

We’re increasing the size of the photos stored from 720 pixels to 2048 pixels on the largest edge, for an 8 times increase overall. I’m really excited to be launching this feature. To see the quality of these pictures, you can view National Geographic’s “Top-Rated Your Shot Photos (September)” album or Sports Illustrated’s “Football Across America” album. Download high-resolution photos by clicking the “Download” link.


While this won't apply to any pictures already on Facebook, any pictures you upload after the new system is in place will have the new specs.  But Facebook isn't done with just that announcement.  They will also be launching a light-box interface similar to Flickr.

"GOOGLE ME" SOCIAL NET PLANNED

Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed at Tuesday's Google Zeitgeist their plan for "Google Me".  Google Me is the internal name for an initiative to bring social networking functions to all of Google's services like YouTube and Gmail.

Some of the planned features are alerts on YouTube when friends view their videos, playing social networking games and accessing data from places like Twitter and Flickr. [Ars Technica]