Courtesy of information designer Robin Richards, check this out: a visual map of all 264 companies Microsoft has acquired in its endless quest to dominate the market. Of course, Microsoft hasn’t always played by the rules of acquisition (not to be confused with the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition), but whatever – considering the company’s history of (mostly) decent software offerings, I’m willing to look the other way. Makes you wish we could see one of these for Apple to compare and contrast, huh? Click to make it big! …

Have you ever tried finding yourself in Google Street View? I have a friend who’s found himself twice. Both times he was pretty blurry, but there was no question. Twice. Six billion people. Found himself twice. What are the odds? If you’re going to go hunting though, you’d better hurry – Arturo Flores, a computer science grad student from UC San Diego, is working on a system that may one day render Google Street View one gigantic ghost town. No pedestrians at all. Flores says that situations such as my friend are exactly the problem that spurred his project – though Google goes to the trouble of blurring…

About an hour ago, Twitter just hit the big two-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. For those of you who would rather not be confused, that’s twenty-effing-billion, and scientifically speaking, that’s a hell of a freaking crap ton of dadgum tweets. The milestone has been hit a mere two months after everyone’s favourite microblogging platform hit 15 billion tweets, and five since 10 billion, which means one definite thing: no, not that Twitter’s growth is still accelerating – that we, as a species, certainly have an awful lot of nothing to say. I’d have captured a more on-the-nose photograph,…