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You can’t escape Twitter anymore. It’s everywhere including in some of Panasonic’s Viera Cast Plasma TVs and eventually, in a few Panasonic Blu-ray players as well. It’s just the latest app available in the already-loaded Viera Cast IPTV offering. Twitter joins Netflix, Pandora, Fox Sports, Amazon Video-on-Demand, YouTube, Icasa, Bloomberg, and Skype’s Video calling service.

Sure it’s no iOS or Google TV, but these Panasonic TVs were doing the app dance three years ago and continue to gain new features. Is 3D the future of HDTVs? Nope, it’s apps. Click through for the release and list of compatible models.

Read more…

The B&N eReader iPad, iPhone, and PC apps are no more. Instead, B&N now has brand new apps, complete with updated features, but more importantly, new branding. From here on out, it will be called Nook for iPad, Nook for iPhone and lastly, Nook for PC. See what they’re doing there? Replacing the B&N branding with that of the Nook just like on the Nook for Android app. Here’s a pic of the previous iPad version. Clever, eh?

In the wake of former CEO Mark Hurd’s sexual harassement scandal, HP is announcing that it is acquiring Fortify, a software security company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Fortify’s Software Security Assurance products and services protect companies from security threats in busines software applications. The company’s software evaluates and test software code for security flaws while programs are actually being developed. Fortify has previously collaborated with HP, integrating its software with HP products in June 2009.

HP says that it will operate Fortify initially as a standalone entity but the company will eventually be folded into HP’s Software and Solutions business. Fortify’s products will become part of the Business Technology Optimization application portfolio, available through HP’s sales and service channels.

Fortify has raised venture funding from DAG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sigma Partners

Clearly the Fortify acquisition is more of an enterprise play. HP’s last two acquisitions, Lala competitor-Melodeo, and smartphone manufacturer Palm, have been in the consumer and hardware space.

If your social graph on Facebook and/or Twitter happens to consist of people who speak many different languages, it’s not always easy to make sense of their status updates.

I know it can be a pain when people I follow constantly switch back and forth from English to Russian, Italian, Hebrew and so forth – because I don’t speak any of their native tongues nearly well enough to get what they’re saying, even though at times I wish I did.

Enter the new version of XIHA Life, a social networking service that allows people to easily connect online even when they speak different languages, thanks to its real-time translation capabilities of chat sessions and update streams.

With the latest update to the XIHA platform, you can connect to both Facebook and Twitter and gain the ability to translate status updates and comments from your friends on those two major social networks with a single click.

The new buttons allow XIHA friends to translate content to over 55 different languages (courtesy of the Google Translate API), making it possible to read updates, polls and interests in one’s native language regardless of the original language of the status update.

XIHA says the feature should prove to be particularly helpful for expats and travelers who tend to meet with people from different cultures but still wish to stay connected despite of those pesky language barriers.

Look at the image above. There are three services listed on the San Francisco Giants’ scoreboard during a baseball game. Twitter. Facebook. Foursquare. The first two are ubiquitous. Each has hundreds of millions of users and a firm place in pop culture. The third has about 2.5 million users. And much of the world has no idea what it is.

But is it on its way to entering that pantheon of great services?

This is a particularly interesting question given that on Wednesday, Facebook is expected to unveil its initial push into the location space. Earlier, BoomTown cited sources stating this would be the case. We’ve since heard from multiple sources as well that location will be at least a part of Facebook’s event (which we’ll obviously be at).

With location, Facebook has long been seen as the 800-pound gorilla in the room. And now they appear ready to check-in for the first time, as it were.

So Foursquare is dead, right? Don’t count on it.

As we’ve been saying for months, it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location. That is, they’re more likely to federate other location streams (such as Foursquare’s) while they themselves remain fairly cautious with their own location services. You can probably expect a bare-bones check-in functionality on their mobile apps (as we spotted months ago).

But just as with their status updates, many people may populate that with location data via third-party services (again, like Foursquare).

That’s not to say Facebook won’t be competing with Foursquare at all. My guess is that a big part of their location play is involving places — that is, real world venues that they can get on Facebook in a major way. As we first reported back in June, Facebook likely has a deal in place with Localeze to build out a massive place database that they’ll then populate with all this data they’re federating and creating on their own.

The potential problem for Foursquare here is if Facebook decides they want to be the ones that partner with all these venues on loyalty deals and programs. Obviously, that would be a problem for just about every location player as this is how most of them are working on monetizing their products. It would also likely be a problem for Yelp. And even Google, increasingly.

That said, Facebook could also choose to promote a service like Foursquare as their check-in partner. The two sides were talking a few months ago when Foursquare was trying to decide whether to sell or raise more money. And while the idea of an acquisition kept coming up, so did other partnership ideas, we hear.

Of course, Facebook could also go with Foursquare rival Gowalla for such a deal. After all, the company behind Gowalla, AlamoFire (they’ve since become just Gowalla), got their start doing Facebook games. And early on, many Facebook employees were known to be active Gowalla users rather than Foursquare users. They’re also still undoubtedly on the acquisition radar as Facebook continues to scoop up talent, such as the Hot Potato team.

Anyway, back to Foursquare. Assuming Facebook doesn’t kill them (which again, isn’t likely to happen), do they have the momentum now to keep growing and rightfully stand alongside Facebook and Twitter?

I already know that all the commenters are going to scream “NO” but let me tell you what I think.

I remember very well when it seemed like just about everything I read on the Internet said that Twitter was the dumbest service ever imagined and it would never go anywhere. I disagreed from day one. I didn’t know exactly what Twitter would be useful for. But I knew something was there.

Believe it or not, the same was once true of Facebook too. People were already on MySpace, so they couldn’t figure out why they would want to use the boring, more closed version: Facebook. Again, I disagreed. There was something there.

With Foursquare, (as should be obvious given how often I write about them) I again believe there is something there. But it’s still in that early Twitter-like stage where I’m not positive what it is yet. (And yes, complete with Twitter-like downtime too.)

The problem is that the initial attraction, the game aspect, lost my interest a long time ago already. Now, i mainly keep using it to see where my friends are, to let them know where I am — and maybe most of all, to keep track of my location history. (I think this is going to be something very cool to have in the future.)

That combination of things would probably keep me using it indefinitely. The problem is that those things likely won’t keep the rest of my social circle using it. And that’s the glue that holds any of these apps together — the social graph. So Foursquare needs to come up with something else to keep those people using it.

I’ve been hearing talk about people getting sick of using Foursquare for some time now. But in recent weeks the talk has gotten louder. It’s not the same check-in fatigue issue that I wrote about several months ago. Instead, it’s a more focused check-in fatigue because many of them just don’t see the point of constantly checking-in place after place — especially if they frequent the same places.

Sure, there are check-in deals and mayor deals, but most people I know (many of whom are heavy Foursquare users) never use those deals. The problem is that there simply aren’t enough of them. And the best ones are mayor deals which are basically impossible to get in a big Foursquare city like San Francisco.

So instead, everyone is simply checking-in because that’s what their friends are doing. That’s a precarious position. Any number of things could stop that. And a chain reaction would occur.

Simply put: Foursquare needs to change their game and needs to do it soon if they want to keep the momentum alive — if they want to reach the pantheon.

They obviously know that, and are working on it. And it sounds like they have some of the right ideas. At least part of the upcoming Foursquare 2.0 is said to be about “choosing your own adventure.” And Foursquare has talked about making the service easier to use by doing things like checking you in if you swipe a loyalty card at a store. That’s a genius idea.

That’s also probably the idea that is a viable business model for Foursquare in the long run. It’s something that may subsidize the whole social location aspect of the service.

But for right now, that social layer is all that matters. They need to keep users engaged or they run the risk of becoming the Friendster of location. They’re coasting right now because most of the users are still new to the service and don’t have any fatigue just yet. But they’ll get there unless Foursquare keeps things interesting. Photos and comments in the stream couldn’t hurt (yes, like Gowalla). And neither could the ability to “like” check-ins. And a completely reworked point system would be good — maybe more closely tied to just your social graph. And one can never have too many badges.

Foursquare is still a very young company. The fact that they were able to secure so many deals with huge brand names early on has perhaps elevated them a bit prematurely. Twitter and Facebook have proven themselves to be indispensable.

With Foursquare, there’s still just something there.

[photo via Tristan Walker]

It looks like Google wasn’t lying when they said they planned to more rapidly iterate their Chrome web browser. Today brought the initial release of version 7 of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on. If all goes as planned, this latest iteration should begin to trickle into the Chrome stream in just a few weeks.

It wasn’t even a week ago that version 6 of Chrome hit the beta stage. While the stable build of Chrome is still stuck on version 5 (5.0.375.126, to be exact), given the rate at which Google is refreshing the beta channel (just about daily), you can probably expect 6 to go stable shortly. Once that happens, builds of version 7 should start making their way into the dev branch of Chrome.

Google has stated that they hope to ship a new version of Chrome every six weeks now.

So what’s new in Chromium version 7? Not too much as far as I can tell right now. Google continues to tweak the UI of the browser a bit, but all of the major features seem the same. That said, version 7 of Chromium does feel noticeably snappier than the latest builds of version 6 of Chrome. Both the beta and dev channel versions of Chrome 6 have seemed slightly buggy over the past week or so. Chromium 7 feels much more solid.

One thing still not enabled by default in Chromium 7 are Chrome Web Apps. While you can get them to work by enabling the appropriate flag, Google clearly doesn’t feel they’re ready for prime time yet. The promise at I/O was to have them ready for “later this year,” so here’s hoping it’s something Google does choose to turn on in version 7 eventually.

But if not, it may only be another few weeks until Chromium 8.

Dear Mark E. Zuckerberg Harvard ’06,

It’s me Alexia, from the future. Just wanted you to know that you’ve come a long long way from The Harvard Crimson’s seminal piece “Hundreds Register for New Facebook Website” which you probably think is a really big deal right now.

Just an FYI, in about six years or so you’ll be counting your accomplishments in the millions and billions, just as long as you listen to whatever Sean Parker says. Trust me, there’s going to be a Hollywood movie where you’re played by a hipster actor and everything.

In case you get discouraged on your way over here, the kind folks at www.website-monitoring.com have made this impressive infographic which you should probably print out and fold into your wallet. And just a heads up, it might be a good idea to put a kibosh on the hoodie.

Best,

Alexia

Buxfer is a social payments service that launched in 2007 as part of that class of new Y Combinator companies. The site is still live and working, but a user, Sean Leather, emailed us to say it’s a bit of a ghost town.

The blog has been taken down and was last updated in 2009. The last tweet was on October 9, 2009, six days after their first tweet. And users are wondering if the site is dead over on Get Satisfaction.

So what happened? The two founders, Shashank Pandit and Ashwin Bharambe, took jobs at Facebook. Bhramabe joined Facebook way back in October 2008, as noted on Buxfer’s About page. But according to Pandit’s LinkedIn profile, he too left the company in June and has been full time at Facebook since late 2009.

So is Buxfer dead or just walking dead? And does it really matter?

Yes, in my opinion. Buxfer also raised a $300,000 angel round of financing. I haven’t been able to speak to the investors yet, but it seems like they’re a lot less likely to see a return on their investment with the founders working at Facebook full time and no other employees around to run the site.

There’s likely a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, and the investors, I’ll assume unless they say otherwise, are probably resigned to a capital gains writeoff. It may be that the founders made a valiant effort at making Buxfer work, and simply took other jobs when it was clear that it wasn’t. And there’s no real reason to shut the site down as long as people’s financial information isn’t jeopardized, I guess. But, generally speaking, you don’t walk away from a startup, and your investors, when there’s still a pulse. It’s just bad form.

This looks like (it might be) another example of a trend we’ve been seeing for some time – Facebook and Zynga “acquiring” startups for their engineers, giving those engineers rich stock options but leaving investors with little more than their money back. Investors don’t balk publicly because they want to maintain an entrepreneur-friendly reputation. But behind the scenes they’re livid.

I described the issue recently:

Most investors won’t balk publicly at deals like this, they’re way too concerned that they’re seen as entrepreneur-friendly so that they can get access to future deals. But privately they gripe (in general, nothing specific to this deal). Putting money to work for only a 1x or 2x return is a great way to go out of business for startup investors, when so many of their deals never pay anything back at all.

In fact some of these deals could theoretically be a violation of various corporate and securities laws that require shareholders of a given class to be treated equally in an acquisition. But without investors actually complaining, it’s unlikely any lawyers will ever get involved.

Also, stock options are clearly being granted for future services of the acquired employees, not for past work done at the acquired startup.

Another way investors can “complain” is by simply scuttling the deal – they usually have veto rights over an acquisition baked into their deal agreements when they invest. But that, again, would be seen as completely anti-entrepreneur and would kill future deal flow.

So for now investors will simply grin and bear it. But as these types of deals become more and more common we may see changes to various state corporate laws in the future that put limits on how much consideration might be given in cash to investors in an acquisition v. how much is given to active employees in stock options on an acquisition.

Entrepreneurs need to remember that they have a reputation, too. They need to treat investors fairly, or the next time they go to raise a round for their shiny new startup they may find nothing but closed doors. At least one recent Facebook acquisition almost erupted into a lawsuit when investors said they didn’t like the deal, we’ve heard. Sometime soon we may see things turn ugly.

The above video reveals exactly why Precise Path Robotics just received $4.5 million in funding. Once you’ve seen the RG3 Robotic Greens Mower, or as I like to call it “Hat-Wearing Golf Course Roomba,” in action it’s pretty hard to imagine a golf course being mowed in any other way.

Did you know there were 32,000 golf courses in the world? Neither did I, but the RG3 is the quickest and most stylish way towards significantly slashing the amount of money each and every one spends on lawn mowing. That’s two billion dollars worth of mowing annually! Serious business for the world’s first robotic mower.

But why stop at mowing? The RG3 technology, which is actually superior to a Roomba because it can travel in straight lines, can be applied to almost any outdoor grooming endeavor.

Says Jason Zielke, Precise Path’s President and COO. “Mowing is the first in a long list of applications we have envisioned — from spraying to snow removal to carving advertising logos in lawns.”

There is such a thing as the perfect job for a robot.

Here’s a video of two RG3s mowing together, peacefully at dawn.

An insane number of searches on the web involve people asking questions. Sometimes they’re good questions, sometimes they’re stupid questions, sometimes they’re insane questions. Just start typing something into Google beginning with the words “How” or “Why” for proof of this — the auto-suggest speaks for itself. Sadly, Google isn’t great at answering questions because they’re a search engine that mainly returns hyperlinks. Sure, your answer may reside on one of those pages, but that requires another click and some browsing. A new service launching out of stealth mode tonight, Swingly, wants to perfect this task.

Of course, there are many other players in this space all of whom have tried to do the same thing or something similar. Answers.com, Ask.com, and more recently Aardvark (which Google acquired earlier this year), Facebook Answers, and Quora. Swingly says it has all of them beat because machine-drive Q+A services are too shallow while human-driven ones are too esoteric — Swingly aims to take the best of both worlds. And so far, they’ve mined the web for over 100 billion question and answer pairings to link up.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the Texas-based startup is that they’re not pretending to be perfect. They claim to be about 75 percent accurate right now. But just in case they can’t back that up, they show related Q&A pairing below their best match to make sure you get what you’re looking for. And that’s actually smart because apparently in their alpha testing of the product, people have proven hungry for knowledge and keep coming back for more. “Our engagement numbers are phenomenal,” the company says.

Again, Swingly’s big claim is that no other Q&A service has yet been able to operate at the scale at which they are right now. The team behind it has 10 years worth of experience building these type of semantic web systems. And we’re told that the parent company, LCC (Language Computer Corporation), has finished with 10 consecutive first place finishes in the annual TREC Question-Answering Evaluation (apparently, the ultimate nerdy Q&A systems challenge).

But really, all that matters here is how useful the service actually is in the real world. So Swingly is giving us 500 invites to dish out to TechCrunch readers. Simply use the code ‘techcrunch’ when you sign up and you’ll be granted access to the service when it’s fully live (which should be soon).

Swingly has also created a side-by-side comparison site so you can see how your questions are answered on their service versus how they are on the competitors. You can find that here (but you need to be logged in for it to work).

Need help thinking of some good questions? Here are some of the most excellent suggestions Swingly sent along:

• What do zombies eat?
• Where are Ballmer’s grandparents from?
• Who graduated from Haverford in 2002?
• What school did Lady Gaga go to?
• What director made A Clockwork Orange?
• What product did Novartis Medical Nutrition make?
• Which politicians died in 2008?
• How much was the first time homebuyer credit?
• Who directed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
• How many copies of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were sold?
• What killed the crocodile hunter?
• When did Steve Irwin die?
• Who is the highest paid player in Major League Soccer
• Who was the Mayor of Dallas in 1963?
• Who has Lindsay Lohan dated?
• What is the fastest animal in the world?
• What do llamas eat?
• What jobs has Martha Stewart had?
• Who did January Jones work for?
• What is January Jones height?
• Who is the coach of the Dallas Cowboys?

Also be sure to check out the videos below. Yes, they’ve smartly made a Facebook trailer spoof for their launch video — and one about how to kill zombies.

When AOL bought hyperlocal news site Patch in June, 2009, it covered five towns in Connecticut and New Jersey. On Tuesday, it will open its 100th Patch, and by the end of the year it plans to open 400 more for a total of 500.

I recently visited AOL’s headquarters to learn more about what Patch is all about. “We look at what we are doing as digitizing towns,” says Patch president Warren Webster (see video interview below). Patch was first founded and funded by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong when he couldn’t find a resource on the Web for volunteer activities his family could do together in the small Connecticut town where he lives. Armstrong bought Patch afterwards when he came to AOL, but only took back his initial investment in AOL shares—and he is obviously very interested in the product. He stuck his head in the conference room where I was getting my demo because he saw the Patch screen projected on the wall.

Matching volunteers with local organizations is still one of Patch’s features, but its main focus is covering local news and creating an in-depth directory of local businesses and places of interest. Each Patch covers a small town with a population between 15,000 and 75,000, places like Fairfield, Connecticut, Mill Valley, California, Scarsdale, New York, and Morristown, New Jersey (which will be the 100th Patch).

The front page covers local news much like you would find in a local small town newspaper (“Police Investigate Drowning,” “A Guide To Walkable Westchester,” “Coyote Attacks Another Young Girl In Rye, Bites Neck“). Each town has its own editor, a “walking newsroom” who writes stories and assigns them to an average of 11 freelancers, who also fill out listings in the directory and take photos. There are also events, announcements, and volunteer opportunities. Readers can add their own.

Some complaints have surfaced about Patch’s low pay and the grueling working conditions (mostly, it seems, from older out-of-work journalists who aren’t used to the rapid-fire pace of Internet publishing). Webster responds that Patch pays “competitive market rates for community journalists” and that “75% of local editors are making the same or more than they did at their last job in journalism—the other 25% came from journalism school or were freelancers.”

But the real engine of Patch is the database it is building up of local businesses. So far it has 105,000 local listings, and is building out more every day. Before Patch launches in a town, it creates a directory of the local businesses, parks, hospitals, schools, and other public places. It launches with about 1,200 for each town, which get entered into Patch’s structured database. Each place gets its own profile page on Patch, with a description and highly detailed data such as teacher/student ratios for schools or suggested dress code and parking options for restaurants. For instance, here is directory listing for the Crabtree Kittle House & Inn in Chappaqua, NY.

The local directory of places is how Patch makes money. If a business wants an enhanced listing, complete with a video tour (shot by one of the 40,000 freelance videographers who work for another AOL acquisition, StudioNow) and preferred placement, that costs $1,000 a year. Patch is going after Yellow Pages and local newspaper advertising dollars.

These profile pages are very search-engine friendly, and any time a Patch article mentions a place in the database, it is automatically linked. “A lot are using their Patch profile as their place on the Web,” says Webster. Patch also offers a self-serve ad tool that turns any directory listing into an online ad unit which can be used on any Website and link either back to their Patch listing or to their own site.

Webster explains Patch’s rollout in terms of phases. The first phase is to get up and running in hundreds of towns and get local residents engaged. The goal is to reach half of each town’s population. “We exceeeeded every metric we had set for ourselves,” boasts Webster. “Phase 2 is how do we get people to buy things from local stores.” That is where the coupons and local deals come in (you saw that one coming). The coupons are shown as ads on the homepage of the towns where the businesses are located, as well as on their directory listings.

The local coupons are still pretty primitive compared the experiments we are seeing from geo startups like Foursquare and shopkick, but Webster hints that a mobile Patch app is coming soon. And when I asked about whether the directory would become available to other developers and startups through an API, he notes that could be coming soon as well: “We are looking at every possible way to distribute Patch content.” Once Patch gets into gear, it could definitely start driving a whole new class of advertising revenues for AOL.

On Sunday, a dozen startups from around Silicon Valley came together for the Startup Cup — a soccer tournament raising money for charity:water that rounded up over $1,200. Companies playing included Box.net, Slide, WePay, Scribd, Weebly, Xobni, Square, UserVoice, Revision3, and Kabam.

The matches were hard-fought, and much sweat (and some blood) was spilled as each company vied for the top prize. In the end, SocialText came out the leader, led by company cofounder Ross Mayfield. And there were no losers: everyone got free Chipotle burritos and Subway sandwiches. I’ve never seen so many burritos at once. It was beautiful.

As with any good sporting event, the tournament was not without its controversy — it didn’t take long to figure out that many of the teams in contention had brought a few ringers who didn’t actually work at their respective companies.  But nobody seemed to mind too much.

For those wondering, Team TechCrunch had a strong showing. Because the rest of the staff was back at TCHQ monitoring the day’s news we could only afford a pair of employees (myself and Alexia), but we rounded out the roster with members of the WePay squad. We won the second half of our match 1-0, but unfortunately the first half (which we considered a warmup) was lopsided in the other direction, leading to our untimely demise at the feet of Team Footbalistic in the first round of the tournament.

Hat tip to Trista Myers, currently an intern at Weebly, for putting the whole thing together.

Child safety monitoring service SafetyWeb is releasing a free version of its online tracking tool today, specifically for law enforcement agencies.

The SWOT tool allows police to secure the social networking accounts of a missing child and access recent status updates. Basically it tracks recent activity across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and any other social networking services a missing child might use to rely information on their whereabouts. The platform also provides instant alerts of its video, social network and photo site tracking.

SWOT got a standing ovation when demoed by SafetyWeb founders (and parents) Geoffry Arone and Michael Clark at the Crimes Against Children Conference last week, which SafetyWeb co-sponsored with Google and Facebook.

This realtime monitoring of  a child’s accounts could be crucial in gathering data leading to a child’s safe return; With over 2000 children going missing daily, free technology that can scour for online traces of missing children is a boon to beleaguered law enforcement officials, as well as frantic parents.

SafetyWeb has recently acquired Odojo as well as announced a $8 million funding round from Battery Ventures and First Round Capital. It shares the child safety and online tracking space with SocialShield and Kidsafe.

Back in June, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith wrote a blog post announcing he was moving on from the company, and handing over the CTO reins. We’ve just confirmed that fellow co-founder Matt Brezina has also left the company.

The timing of Brezina’s departure isn’t fully clear, but we hear it was also a few weeks ago — he just didn’t have the big blog post about it. Obviously, having both co-founders leave so closely to one another is a bit odd. It was only this past April that they raised a large $16.2 million Series C round led by Khosla Ventures and RRE Ventures. Talk was that this put their post-money valuation at around $65 million. The company also recently moved into a new office in the SoMa area of San Francisco (Twitter’s old offices, actually) and crazy mural spending aside, it would seem that things were fine on the surface.

But before we confirmed the Brezina news, we had been hearing whispers of growing discontent within Xobni. The direction of the company and current management was cited as being two issues of concern in particular.

Initially a Y Combinator company, Xobni launched at the first TC40 conference in 2007. In 2008, the company was about to be acquired by Microsoft for something in the $20 million-range (they had only raised about $5 million at the time) but they walked away at the last second. At the time, they were focused on improving Microsoft Outlook, but they’ve since taken their tools to everything from BlackBerry to Gmail.

Update: I’ve now spoken with Brezina who confirms his exit but says it’s only because they’ve hired good people to run the company — of course, they always tend to say things like that, and in fact, Smith said the same thing. That said, Brezina did confirm that he and Smith are still on the board and involved.

As for what’s next, Brezina is working on it. Stay tuned.

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt that covered a range of topics including Google’s future, newspapers, and privacy. The article contains some choice quotes about the future of search (there’s a somewhat ominous bit about Google knowing about your location, friends, and interests, so it can figure out what you want before you even want it — but this really shouldn’t be news to anyone). And then there’s this, as first called out by ReadWriteWeb:

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

Err, seriously? Google’s CEO thinks that people are going to start changing their names as a way to distance themselves from their past indiscretions on social media sites? Maybe I’m just myopic (I’m sure Schmidt has a much better understanding of the future of search than I do), but this notion isn’t just scary — it seems downright pointless.

Consider this: it’s in the best interest of just about any business to figure out if any of its prospective new recruits has a criminal record. And to verify that their job history checks out. And that their college degree is more than a figment of their imagination. Schmidt may be envisioning a centralized system where such critical background information is available to employers without their needing an applicant’s full name, which could make a name change worthwhile. Fair enough.

But if this name-changing practice became commonplace, how long would it take for an entire industry to emerge built around helping businesses who wanted to go the extra mile and link people with their “former” identities? You can bet they’d pay for that privilege. There’d probably be a pretty hefty market for people running searches on their new boy- and girlfriends, too.

And then there’s always the possibility that a spiteful ex tweets out your “old” name as a act of vengeance, or that a friend accidentally tags you under the “wrong” name on Facebook (or whatever social network is popular in this hypothetical future). Good luck getting that back in the bag — you can bet that these new-and-improved search engines are going to be far less forgiving than they are today. And Schmidt has previously said that Google can visually identify people with a mere fourteen photos, which could render this all a moot point to begin with.

In other words, in an age where search will be much more powerful than it is now, a simple name change probably won’t present much of a hurdle to anyone actively looking to dive into your online past. Schmidt’s right about one thing though: society really doesn’t understand what will happen when “everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time”. Let’s just hope it eventually comes up with a better way to deal with that problem than a new nametag.