Link: Inside Google — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social

Google, the world’s largest search company, is formally making its pitch to become a major force in social networking. The product it announced Tuesday is called Google , and observers might wonder whether it’s simply one more social effort by a company that’s had a lousy track record in that field to date.

Link: Can North Africa Light Up Europe with Solar Power?

Twenty-five years after Gerhard Knies conceived of powering Europe with the Sahara Desert’s sun, the North Africa Solar project has grown into something considerably more than a mere mirage, but it’s still less than a reality.

Link: How ICANN’s Approval of New Domains Will Change the Web

The final barrier to a new era for the Internet was lifted this morning, when the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (“ICANN”) voted 13 to 3 in favor of introducing new top level domains (“TLDs”) to compete with .com, .net, .org and country codes like .ca and .mx. The vote, held in Singapore before a thousand-strong audience of tech insiders and broadcast live online, was met with a standing ovation. A core deliverable of ICANN since its inception, new TLDs have been the subject of six years of intense debate contributing to ICANN’s bottom-up approach to policy making. As one board member put it, “every imaginable aspect has been examined six ways from Sunday.”

Link: 12 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros

Link: HTML5 Rocks – New Tricks in XMLHttpRequest2