Google continues to expand its social expertise with the acquisition of Angstro, a small social networking start-up.
Angstro builds apps to easily exchange information among social services across the Web, pulling in data from social sites including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Its co-founder, Rohit Khare, said in a blog post on Friday that he had joined Google, presumably to work on a rumored social network project. Google, which is staying mum about its social ambitions, confirmed the acquisition and hiring of Mr. [...]

The deal appears focused on snaring the considerable talents of Dr. Rohit Khare, a software engineer with almost two decades of technical and standards experience at organizations like MCI, the WorldWideWeb consortium, one-time enterprise RSS industry heavyweight KnowNow and CommerceNet, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to R&D in support of commerce online.

The entire Internet (aka Facebook, Google, Apple AOL, Facebook, eBay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube) has just been served with a vague and vast patent violation suit from Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen. As patent suits are notoriously unpopular, the response from tech pundits has been apprehensive. Now the companies named are starting to punch back, a representative from Facebook told TechCrunch, “We believe this suit is completely without merit and we will fight it vigorously.”

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Warning: This tip is only for Gmail users outside US.
Google says that the latest Gmail feature that allows you to make phone calls is only available in the US, but that’s not true. If you set Gmail’s interface language to English (US), you should see the “Call phone” option in the chat roster. You can also buy credit using Google Checkout.