Twitter is an ever-expanding source of fascinating information.

If recent patents are any indication, your future iMac might just include a built-in iPad .

Microsoft is working on a new technology, dubbed Street Slide, aimed at reshaping the street-level mapping space currently dominated by Google Street View and Microsoft’s Bing Streetside.

BP may have been able to cap the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, but cleanup efforts are really just beginning. In an interesting intersection between technology and social activism, QR codes could prove instrumental in helping ensure that the Gulf is fully restored. Nonpartisan activist group Women of the Storm is rallying public support around Gulf restoration

Composing an e-mail is kind of like making out: Everyone assumes they know what they’re doing, but in reality plenty of people could use some pointers. We’re all pretty much constantly sending missives around the web. In 2009, worldwide e-mail traffic amounted to 247 billion messages per day, according to market research firm Radicati

RIM has just added a new geolocation feature to its Locate Service toolkit, which will permit BlackBerry developers to use cellular tower data when grabbing location data for their apps. This will ultimately enable apps to use cellular towers to approximate location if a user is in an area without GPS coverage

In October, Redbox may challenge Netflix by announcing a web site for movie rentals, but it’s not clear yet whether that site will provide DVD-by-mail service, direct downloads, streaming videos or some combination of the three. Bloomberg reports that Redbox COO and former Netflix guy Mitch Lowe said his company might try to offer a wider variety of titles in an online service than it does in its 24,000 retail dispenser kiosks

According to French-language newspaper Le Soleil, Apple has acquired Poly9, an online mapping company based in Quebec. The translated article reports that since the acquisition, the majority of Poly9 employees have moved from Quebec to Apple’s offices in California. As Apple Insider notes, the Poly9 website is down, although parts of the Poly9 Globe site are still accessible

Those intrepid folks at Improv Everywhere are at it again — this time they invaded a New York City subway car, treating passengers to a reenactment of the first Princess Leia/Darth Vader scene from Star Wars . We’ve seen comedy troop Improv Everywhere undertaking a ton of missions in the past — from the No-Pants Subway Ride to staging a scene from Ghostbusters in the New York Public Library — but we’ve never seen such a big reaction from onlookers. In the Ghostbusters vid it was immediately obvious who was a native New Yorker and who was a tourist –even sans walking lane — judging by who had the biggest reaction to the goings-on.

Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007.