Google Docs has a lot going for it as an office or writing tool, and we imagine the Research sidebar, which appears to have recently launched on the suite, will help bolster its popularity. After…

What happens when all the things we based our icons on don’t exist anymore? Do they just become, ahem, iconic glyphs whose origins are shrouded in mystery? Save? Save where? You know, down there. Adding the Arrow to the 3.5″ floppy makes me smile. Is it pointing to under my desk? What’s a floppy? Why not a USB key? Maybe a cloud icon?

A network of pitchmen have used the internet and fear of a failing economy to play the ultimate long con

You see that giant table of smartphones and tablets? Those are all of the Android devices app development firm Animoca uses to test its apps. You see, when you have dozens of manufacturers cranking out phones, tablets and phablets running different versions of Android, you run into a development issue. How do you make sure your app will work on the majority of Android devices? For Animoca, you test your apps on 400 different Android devices.

If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have a realistic shot at being the Republican nominee and Barack Obama would be on track to crush Mitt Romney in the biggest landslide in American history. Despite the hype over follower counts, a new study shows that there’s no credible evidence that Twitter can be used to predict how elections will turn out. “It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated,” writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello, in an unusually strident rant (for an academic). Gayo’s conclusions are intuitive: social media users are an unrepresentative slice of voters, and tweets may not accurately reflect how voters behave.

According to trusted sources, Apple has an incredible headline feature in development for iOS 6: a completely in-house maps application. Apple will drop the Google Maps program running on iOS since 2007 in favor for a new Maps app with an Apple backend. The application design is said to be fairly similar to the current Google Maps program on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but it is described as a much cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience.

May 9 is, in a way, a watershed day for Android — and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Many developers I communicate with repeatedly say they confront the same quandary: Android or iOS first? Maybe they choose to develop for iOS, only to ask: Android or iPad next? Google is a software developer, too, and this day put its priorities in order with a stunning iOS-first update. The new iPhone app for social network Google+ is stunning, breathtaking, immersive and makes the already great experience on Ice Cream Sandwich seem outdated — although some of the best visuals migrate to iOS.

The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.

Google Currents is essentially an app that pulls various elements of a website’s online presence (be it their RSS feed, YouTube channel, social media outlets, and so on) into a centralized platform for easy access. It is essentially an advanced aggregation service, with built-in features including offline access and language translation.