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A number of new sites have launched recently to help people make decisions.

LetSimonDecide is geared toward young adults to aid life goal setting and decision making skills. There are a number of personality "quizzes" to help make decisions and goals.

The age digital divide is one of the lasting digital divides in the United States, as older people have the lowest adoption rate and levels of use.

The NYT writes about older American adults, especially those that live alone, using social network sites to keep in touch with family and friends.

Will social networking sites be a driving force in bringing seniors online?

In possible preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, China has begun to block many sites likeTwitter, Flickr, Blogger and YouTube.

Google Books with over 7 million scanned books is an amazing resource and an exciting project. It is not without controversy though. The recent settlement about the copyright and intellectual property issues surrounding the scanning of the books still does not resolve the debate. For more on the legal implication, check out this summary blog post.

Google announced a new feature for GMail that allows users to automatically translate emails into English and any other supported language (41 supported languages, or 98% of current Internet users).

NPR Backstory is an automated Twitter account feed that provides links to old news stories that might be relevant to current events. It uses NPR's API (That's application programming interface (API), a set of routines, data structures, object classes and/or protocols provided by libraries and/or operating system services in order to support the building of applications - Wikipedia).

A recent Nielsen study covered here as well found that 60% of Twitter users quit after 1 month.

But the study didn't consider any of the third-party applications for desktops or smartphones, through which many users access their Twitter feeds.

Twitter is a great resource in a crisis. Up-to-the-second reporting from citizens adds rich information.

In the last Santa Barbara fire, the Tea Fire, Twitter was being used primarily by early adopters with an interest in reporting the news.

In the recent Jesusita fire, a lot more people have adopted Twitter. While some of this is great: @SBRedCross has a lot of great information, for example. But a lot of the #jesusita posts and many more that result from a search of "santa barbara" are tweets offering prayers or stating how hot it is.