I’m a huge strategy/product/UI/web nerd and believe that a core element of great design is an ability to improve peoples’ everyday lives. Little Big Details is my favorite UI site. Pictured here is a feature that Google Doodles you a happy birthday based on your Google+ settings. Regardless of its current/future success, watching Google+ roll-out and integrate with other Google Products this year has been a lot of fun.

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A new experimental online game is taking the Facebook experience to a whole new level. META Assassins, a tournament-based assassination game, makes use of a downloadable plugin to detect browser activity and, in turn, triggers shootouts when your assigned ‘target’ lands on the same page. This concept game also features real jobs, like Streetview Surveillance and Dead Drops, where real drops are placed in your city for a fellow player to retrieve in exchange for game cash.

Bessemer Venture Partnershas been Venture Capital investing since 1911. While they’ve had their successes (Skype), they’ve had their complete screw ups as well. Perhaps their worst pass? Google.

‘Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine’. Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, ‘How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?’

The Wilderness Downtown is an amazing interactive web film by Chris Milk and some guys over at Google. Taking your hometown, it incorporates Google Earth and Google Street view into a unique visual experience that literally comes alive with melody and feeling. It utilizes motion within the Google Chrome browser to create a sort of montage effect within itself.

You can turn your doodles into photo-montages with the online tool PhotoSketch, which uses images from Flickr, Google and Yahoo to produce composite images based on even the most rudimentary drawings. [image via CreativeReview]

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By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (‘sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading?

If we accept that Google is becoming the repository of all our information (via its enormous web archive of over 25 billion pages), and the collector of all our questions (via our 400 million search queries a day), it’s not a such big step to argue that by owning the input and the output, it’s becoming a collective world brain.

If Google can predict flu outbreaks, presumably its engineers can also pull back our collective mood (the world is ‘grumpy’ based on search terms), hopes, dreams and more.

Should Google become a collective asset for the world to harness in non-commercial ways?

Judging by Yahoo’s top searches for 2008 (with Britney Spears at number one), Yahoo is its teen sibling.

Conceptual artist Pascual Sisto stumbled across a Google Maps street view of Minnie Street in Fairbanks Alaska that was obscured by a plastic bag. He has the view preserved on his site in case Google decides to re-photograph the intersection.