Among all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune this week — folks fuming about iPhones , Biebs and Gaga clawin’ to the death, Mel Gibson… doing stuff — we thought it prudent to inject a little sunshine, hence the theme of this week’s roundup: looooooove. The Old Spice Dude started the goodwill train, and we’re here to help it pull into the happiness station… or something. I mean, not truly , ’cause a lot of the following videos are satirical and not all that uplifting, but it’s better than seeing how many crumpled pieces of paper you can get in the office trash can while lamenting your dateless Saturday night, amirite?

Google has acquired semantic web and real world database company Metaweb , a move the company says will help them “improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone.” We wrote about Metaweb back in 2008 when they received a significant chunk of funding to the tune of $42 million, on top of their first round of $15 million back in 2006. Since then the company has built its Freebase open database into a collection of over 12 million items from entertainment (movies, books, TV shows) to locations, celebrities, companies and other “real world” objects. Google says the plan is to preserve and further develop the database and hope to enlist other companies to make use of and contribute to the data.

You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their friends. This is especially true when it comes to social networks such as Facebook, where – as two MIT students have shown – your friends’ sexual orientation can be used to determine yours , even if you haven’t explicitly disclosed it

Worldwide communication has come a long way due to social media, but there are a couple of barriers that affect conversation across borders. One would be the ease of communication. Most web-based communication platforms require signups or downloadable clients