Google has agreed to pay a hefty sum to make a class action lawsuit concerning Google Buzz disappear — $8.5 million, to be exact.

The lawsuit dates back to February, when lawyers filed a class action complaint against Google on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a 24-year-old Florida resident and Harvard Law School student. The complaint alleged that Buzz violated several communication privacy laws related to protecting user privacy.

Google Buzz caught a lot of flak for its auto-follow and opt-in features, so much so that Google quickly made privacy fixes after launch. They weren’t enough to quell the criticism though, so Google launched a privacy reset for Buzz, giving users a new opportunity to adjust their privacy settings.

According to the settlement, these changes addressed the key privacy issues surrounding Buzz. “Google has made changes to the Google Buzz user interface that clarify Google Buzz’s operation and users’ options regarding Google Buzz,” it stated.

That’s not all, though. While the settlement acknowledges that Google Buzz’s privacy issues have been resolved, it says the company must do more to educate users about Google Buzz’s potential impact on privacy. The $8.5 million from the settelement will go towards lawyer fees (30%) and the seven named plaintiffs (up to $2,500 each), with the remainder going towards organizations and non-profits focused on Internet privacy.

Now that the privacy issues have been settled, Google can focus on a more important problem: actually producing a winner in the social media space.

[via AFP]

More About: Googl, google buzz, law, lawsuit, privacy

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Sprout Social

Quick Pitch: Sprout Social delivers comprehensive tools that allow businesses to efficiently and effectively manage and grow their social presence across multiple channels.

Genius Idea: Sprout Social is a social relationship manager designed to let small businesses, agencies and brands manage multiple social networks from one central dashboard.

It’s becoming more and more essential for companies and brands of all sizes to have a social media presence. One of the continuing hurdles that these companies continue to face, however, is how to manage multiple social channels.

The fundamental problem is that most social networks were designed for consumers, not for businesses. That means that the tools required to monitor and manage those networks are usually not built into the service itself.

In the last 12 months, more and more players have entered the social media management space. Some, like Involver and Vitrue, take a higher-level approach to big brands and also offer app-creation tools. Other services like HootSuite straddle the line between consumer- and business-friendly.

We like that Sprout Social is a solid offering for the smaller brand or agency; it offers more robust management tools, but it’s still affordable. Pricing starts at $9.99 per month for managing up to five identities. For $49.99 per month, 10 identities or locations can be managed and additional metrics and more advanced tracking data is available.

At the $9.99 per month plan, Sprout Social can monitor Twitter, Facebook (fan and personal pages) and LinkedIn. This means you can search and monitor those networks, cross-post to networks and do things like link and referral tracking.

For users that opt to spend $49.99 per month, Sprout Social adds Foursquare and Yelp support, geotargeting and the ability to create daily specials or offers. This makes Sprout Social a particularly useful tool for local businesses like restaurants or retail shops.

Check out this video to see what Sprout Social is all about. What tools does your business use to manage its social media presence? Let us know!

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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Luis Suarez has a dream, and it’s one that many of us with our overloaded inboxes could well buy in to — a world without e-mail.

In fact, it could be argued that Suarez is living the dream. In less than three years, he’s been able to reduce 90% of his incoming e-mail by communicating through social software, and he works full-time for IBM while living in the Canary Islands. The last six years of his 13-year IBM career have been spent working remotely from Gran Canaria, a place which he describes as “a paradise island,” and not just because his boss is 6,000 kilometers away.

So how does a man who works remotely for a major tech company manage to virtually eliminate his e-mail, and why does his mission even exist? We caught up with Suarez and asked.

Under his official title of Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist in the IBM Software Group division, Suarez promotes the use of social software for enterprise. But in 2008, he decided to take the promotion a bit further by actively showing colleagues how much more productive they could be using social tools on the web, instead of more traditional methods of intra-company communication.

“Around two and a half years ago in my role of software evangelism, one of the main hurdles we were hearing from people is … they perceive this software as another set of tools on top of what they were already using,” Suarez tells us. “They had this feeling that, you’re asking me to spend more time online with Twitter, Facebook and whatever the internal social software applications were.”

Suarez saw this as a challenge and decided he needed to prove to his colleagues that social software was the answer and not the problem. Two and a half years ago he began “a little experiment.”

“As a remote employee, I’m wanted to prove to everyone that I could keep working for the company without using e-mail, relying almost … exclusively on social software tools to communicate daily with my team members.”

His plan was to show his coworkers just how dependent they really were on e-mail, emphasizing how many times a day they were compelled to check it, and proving that it was no longer a productivity tool, but a procrastinator’s best friend.

He acknowledges that times have changed. Ten years ago, e-mail was absolutely necessary for business interactions. Yet in the last two and a half years, he’s advocated for social software to replace e-mail as the go-to communication method.

Rather than restricting file and data sharing conversations to personal inboxes, Suarez persuades employees to first share data more openly behind company firewalls, and then as they ease into the concept (and if it’s relevant), share it on wider social services.

“I’ve kept track of progress,” he says. “I’ve gone from 30 to 40 e-mails a day to an average of just 17 per week. Most of those are one-on-one private conversations, for which e-mail is still probably the best tool for anything sensitive or confidential.”

This is his proof, he says. The numbers show that social software isn’t about adding more work and stress, but looking for smarter ways to get the job done.

With technology changing rapidly, it’s worthwhile to wonder if ten years down the line, e-mail may still be as prominent in our lives as it is today.

“We will still have e-mail in ten years,” says Suarez. “I don’t want to kill all e-mail, but I want to help people re-purpose it. We will see traditional tools like e-mail redesigned to be used for what it was originally designed for.”

For Suarez, the e-mail of the future will look something like this:

“You get an alert, telling you how and where you can go and grab content … it won’t just be a notification system, but a read-write opportunity with the option to engage back so that information is no longer stuck in an inbox.”

While his work focuses on helping businesses make the most of social software, he has shared his how-to advice with us so that individuals can take steps to reduce the amount of e-mail they receive.

1. Don’t Reply

If you want to stop receiving so much e-mail, the number one rule is don’t reply to it. The more you reply, the more you will get back. If you break that chain, you are already on a good path to kill most of the e-mail you get.

2. Study Your Inbox

Next, study your inbox. Evaluate the kind of personal interactions that are taking place there. For example, you may find out that you subscribe to a hundred newsletters and you don’t read any of them.

After you’ve studied the way you use your inbox, try to group e-mails together into categories — newsletters, Q&As, e-mails from family members, etc.

3. Tackle One Area a Week

After you’ve evaluated you intake, slowly move one of those groups away from your inbox. Don’t try to cover them all in one go, because it will be too much.

One week, unsubscribe from newsletters and try and find alternative sources such as a feed reader or relevant Twitter accounts.

You may find that you are bombarded with e-mail questions from colleagues, and that you get one particular question 40 times from 40 different people in one month.

So the next week, sort out the Q&A. The way to deal with that is to set up a blog offering the answers. The blog will be indexed by Google, and your answers will be available to everyone out there. This means you are no longer part of the bottle neck, and you are helping people to feed themselves with the information that they need.

“Some people say to me, but you are lucky, you’re [at] a big IT company,” concludes Suarez. “It may seem easy for a big company, but with the huge amounts of options we have out there — all the various social software tools — there is no longer an excuse.”

You can read more from Luis Suarez on his Knowledge Management blog, Thinking Outside the Inbox.

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

– 20 Cool Twitter Accounts for Daily Fun and Inspiration [PICS]
– 5 Free Ways to Never Miss a Twitter @Reply
– 7 Services to Find and Reserve Your Name Across the Web
– HOW TO: Get Tweetable Moments from Your Presentations
– 5 Trends Affecting How We Connect Through Social Media

More About: business, email, IBM, interview, luis suarez, small business, social media, social software, telecommuting, trending, twitter

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In today’s world of real-time status updates, search is evolving to account for the social nature of the web. Facebook is pushing forward in this direction with on-site search functionality that now displays search results — for Facebook and web content — based on “Likes” and shares.

Facebook appears to have quietly rolled out the beefed-up search offering some time over the past few days; it was first spotted by All Facebook.

From the looks of it, Facebook is ranking results based on how users engage with content via its social plugins. It’s unclear how Facebook is defining its formula — the formula seems to account for shares and Likes from a member’s friends as well as shares and Likes from everyone else to determine an item’s placement.

Just recently, Facebook was awarded a search patent for “ranking search results based on the frequency of clicks on the search results by members of a social network who are within a predetermined degree of separation.”

The company has yet to officially announce the new search functionality or explain how it works. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information and will update this post when we know more.

For the time being, consider this yet another small step in Facebook’s designs to capture search share and harness the abundance of data available around their social plugins.

Update: Facebook responded to our inquiry explaining, “We launched the ability to see articles shared by your direct friends in the search typeahead. For instance, if your friend is on a news site and clicks “Like” under one of the articles (which will then go into News Feed), when you go to search for that article on Facebook, it will surface in the dropdown.”

More About: facebook, likes, Search

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Today, NVIDIA announced the GeForce 400M Series, a major addition to its lineup of mobile graphics processing units (GPUs).

The 400M series features seven new processors, including the GTX 470M and GTX 460M monsters aimed at “enthusiast users,” as well as the GT 445M, GT 435M, GT 425M, GT 420M and GT 415M, intended for real-world use.

If you’re questioning why NVIDIA is releasing five GT GPUs, you’re not alone. While there will likely be a noticeable difference between GT and GTX models, the variations between any two of the GT processors are likely to be minimal.

Like all things currently graphics-related (or so it seems), the 400M will support stereoscopic 3D video. Those of you with a 3D TV will be pleased to know that the 400M GPUs include NVIDIA 3DTV Play software, which enables 3D content playback on compatible TVs.

More important, though, is the inclusion of NVIDIA Optimus, a technology that switches the GPU off in order to conserve battery power when its not processing graphics-heavy materials. This allows for flexibility in notebook longevity, while not degrading performance.

The GeForce 400M GPUs will be available in upcoming notebooks from Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba.

More About: 3D, Acer, Asus, dell, GeForce, GPU, graphics, Hardware, lenovo, mobile computing, NVIDIA, samsung, Toshiba

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Happy Labor Day weekend, folks! I’m guessing that many of you are heading home this fine Friday to dine and drink with friends and merry relations. Well, you know what happens when you get scads of loved ones together in one room? Dark truths are revealed (that and Aunt Marge’s bald head after she loses her wig limboing at your yearly BBQ).

So in honor of all the upcoming unburdening, we’ve made “Secrets” the theme of this week’s YouTube roundup.

The below vids, however, are less Tear-Your-Family-Apart and more Fun-For-The-Whole-Clan, so we suggest firing up the old laptop (or iPad) and gathering your brood around the screen for some thoroughly illuminating YouTube fare.

Snoop Dogg’s Secret

Josh Catone: Snoop… seeeeeeecrets.

Beatboxing Flute Inspector Gadget Remix

Erica Swallow: Inspector Gadget can solve any secret with the help of his trusty friends Penny and Brain, but can he figure out how this guy plays the Inspector Gadget theme song on the flute while beatboxing simultaneously?

Scary Hidden Camera

Jay Irani: I’m so glad no one told these people about the hidden camera.

Turkey Scared Squirrel

Sarah Kessler: I’m glad no one told this squirrel about the hidden camera.

Inception Cat

Brenna Ehrlich: Psst… Your world is not real!

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, bobbieo

More About: favorite-youtube-videos, Film, humor, music, pop culture, viral video, youtube

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Just because the economy is still depressed doesn’t mean you have to be. In fact, there are plenty of ways to live it up without seeing your bank balance plummet — especially if you know how to use social media to live the good life on tight budget.

Even the most reclusive social media shut-ins need to leave the house for some in-person networking at some point. And when you do, you don’t want to look like the poor slob who just threw on whichever pants were closest to the computer screen. Nor do you want to be the designer diva who can’t afford cab fare because she blew all her bucks on a brand name bag. Fortunately, thanks to a few online tips and tricks, high fashion doesn’t have to come with a high price tag.

Smell the Savings

Coco Chanel once said, “A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” While Coco may have been overstating her case a bit, it’s true that perfume and cologne are great accessories to any outfit. Of course, buying the good stuff can also be a great way to flush a fortune down the drain. That’s why sample sizes should be your new best body-odor-fighting friend.

Don’t let their small size fool you — one of these little bottles will still probably give you a good six months of sweet scents, depending on how heavily you use it. Sample perfumes start as low as $1.99 on Amazon, and because they’re so small, shipping is extremely cheap. If you buy from a bigger retailer like FragranceNet, they’ll also usually throw in other goodies like more perfume or makeup samples.

Personal Stylists Are Out of Style

Before you buy any clothes to go with that signature scent, use a site like Polyvore or ShopStyle to be your own personal wardrobe stylist — no hefty retainer required. These sartorial social networks let you “try before you buy” by giving you the tools to put together looks online, so you can see how clothes and accessories will work together.

With huge databases of designer duds, this is a great way to test drive an outfit before you spend cold, hard cash on it, and a great way to keep track of what you already have in your closet. Plus, with everyone posting different looks, these are also great places to get inspiration for new ways to wear the stuff you’ve already shelled out the cash for.

Keep Your Cash

When you are ready to make a big clothing or beauty purchase, make sure you use a service like eBates, which gives you a percentage of what you spend on their partner sites back as a cash rebate. So, it’s basically like you’re paying yourself to shop — or at least that’s what you can tell yourself to justify spending so much on shoes.

Sample Sale Sites

Of course, you can avoid spending full price on anything by signing up for a private sale site. These sites are the online equivalent of a sample sale, giving you exclusive access to amazing deals on designer looks. And, many of them will even e-mail you when a sale matching your particular preferences pops up.

With so many sale sites to choose from, it can sometimes be difficult to decide which ones are worth opening your inbox too. If you’re looking for basics like great jeans or tees, then BlueFly is probably your best bet. This mainstream online shopping mall also has a fantastic private sale area, where anyone can browse big discounts on designer duds from brands like Theory, Prada and Louboutin. You don’t even have to sign up to use it, although registered users can ask to be notified about new deals via e-mail.

If you’re into the higher end of high fashion, then Gilt Groupe, Net-A-Porter and Haute Look are all great bets for big name brands. Gilt Man gives guys the same exclusive deals on a site built just for them. Gilt Groupe even has an iPhone/iPad/Android app to let you shop sales on the go. Net-A-Porter lets you do the same from your iPhone/iPad.

For more unique, up-and-coming designers, head to Rue La La, which has a slightly younger aesthetic and a lot of fun, playful finds. If you’ve got little ones to outfit too, use Zulily. They’ve got great clothes and accessories for kids, and a few things for mom too.

Vintage: Everything Old is New Again

If brand new brands aren’t your bag, the web is also a great place to track down fabulous vintage finds, which often cost far less than their shiny new counterparts. In the dark ages before the Internet, finding that amazing designer piece of vintage clothing was like searching for the proverbial needle in a big, messy thrift store haystack. But now, there are some great options for perusing the previously worn racks from the comfort of your computer screen.

Etsy, Rusty Zipper, Archive Vintage and Posh Girl Vintage are just a few of the places where you can score hot looks with a little bit of history behind them. CMadeleines has a great listing of vintage duds by designers, including pieces by Chanel, Dior and Hermes. And, TheFrock has fantastic vintage dresses, including a great bridal boutique.

Speaking of brides, if you’re looking to accessorize all of those fabulous outfits you just bought online, you can score great jewelry deals — including deeply discounted bridal bling — at I Do, Now I Don’t. This site specializes in the sale of jewels by scorned exes who want to unload them fast for much less than what they were purchased for in the first place. You can bid on necklaces, bracelets, rings and more, or buy them outright. Just try to avoid reading the stories about why the items are being sold, unless you want to spend a whole lot more in retail therapy to get your mood back up.

Why Buy When You Can Rent?

If you just need a single look for a particular event, or you want to get all the benefits of a brand name buy without all that pesky commitment and cold, hard cash, then you want a runway rental service. These sites offer what A-list celebrities have been privy to for years; borrowing. Designer duds and amazing accessories can be rented for far less than you’d pay to actually own them.

It’s sort of like Netflix for your closet. Bag, Borrow or Steal and From Bags to Riches offer amazing purses and accessories, and Rent the Runway has clothing options guaranteed to get even the most finicky fashionista frothing at the mouth — or the keyboard, as the case may be.

Fashion Goes Social

Even if you’re not necessarily an online shopper — or renter — you can still get great gear at low prices using the web. You can follow brands like Louis Vuitton on Foursquare and Toms Shoes on Gowalla for insider info, good deals and the chance to win great stuff.

Or you can use Stylophane to quickly find your favorite fashion brands on Facebook. If you want to find coupons you can use in the real world, CheapTweet will let quickly scan everyone who is sharing a fashion or beauty sale on Twitter in real time, so you know which coupons to print out and which ones to pass on. You can also send a tweet to @couponbot with the name of your favorite store, and see what deals come back.

Of course, you should also make sure you accessorize your favorite mobile device with an app like ShopSavvy, which lets you scan bar codes of stuff you’re thinking about buying to see if there’s a better price elsewhere. Because if you’re paying the bill for a decent smartphone data plan, you definitely can’t afford to pay full price for fashion when there’s a sale going on somewhere else.

No matter what your style, saving money is always in. Especially with the recession turning penny-pinching into the hottest trend for fall. But thanks to the Internet, you can be on top of that trend – and many more – without a lot of extra effort or energy. Because saving money on style is great. But saving money on style while sitting at home in your pajama pants is even better.

More Social Media Resources from Mashable:

– 14 Sites Changing the Way We Shop
– How the Fashion Magazine Industry Plans to Profit from Digital This Fall
– 10 Essential Accessories for the Fashionable Geek
– How the Fashion Industry is Embracing Social Media
– 5 Ways Social Media Changed Fashion in 2009

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Alija

More About: bag borow or steal, bluefly, chanel, cheeptweet, cmadeleines, cuponbot, ebates, Etsy, facebook, fashion, foursquare, fragrancenet, from bags to riches, gilt groupe, haute look, i do now i don’t, ipad, iphone, louis vuitton, net a porter, polyvore, posh girl vintage, prada, rent the runway, rusty zipper, shopping, shopsavvy, shopstyle, social media, social media good life, stylophane, thefrock, theory, twitter, vintage, zulily

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NASA has just released an iPad version of its official NASA app for iPhone.

NASA HD is a free app that lets users view thousands of NASA images, information about current NASA images and videos, as well as live stream NASA TV.

The app also includes access to curated topic areas, like “Women in Space,” and to NASA Twitter feeds from around the agency.

While the satellite trackers and mission information is interesting, our favorite part of the app are the photographs. NASA has a huge archive of photographs — some of which were released to Flickr earlier this week — and thousands of these images are accessible in the app. You can also share photos and videos via Twitter and Facebook.

Check out this gallery to see the NASA HD app in action.

NASA iPad – Home Screen

NASA iPad – Home Screen

NASA iPad – Jupiter

NASA iPad – Satellite Views

You can go directly to specific satellites based on planet or orbiting object.

NASA iPad – Satellite Website

NASA iPad – Flash Fail

Someone forgot to tell NASA that the iPad doesn’t support Flash.

NASA iPad – NASA Locations

NASA iPad – NASA Locations Details

NASA iPad – Moon

NASA iPad – Moon images

NASA iPad – Moon images share

NASA iPad – Photo Collections

NASA iPad – Photo Gallery

NASA iPad – Share Options

NASA iPad – Twitter Connection

NASA iPad – Tweeting Message

NASA iPad – Tweeting Message

NASA iPad – Tweet Sent

NASA iPad – Women in Space

NASA iPad – Launch Schedule

NASA iPad – NASA Website

NASA iPad – NASA TV

NASA iPad – NASA Playback

NASA iPad – Image of the Day

NASA iPad – Image of the Day Link

NASA iPad – Image Links

NASA iPad – Image Gallery

NASA iPad – NASA Tweets

NASA iPad – Glorious

[via CNET]

More About: ipad apps, NASA, NASA HD, NASA ipad, space

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Apple this week launched Ping, a new social network that runs within the iTunes software.

Ping takes the “activity stream” format popularized by Twitter and Facebook and applies it to the music your friends are “talking about, listening to, and downloading”.

In theory, this should take us beyond mainstream hits and further down the so-called “long tail” of lesser known artists. It’s here that Ping fails to deliver: The network is currently just another way to follow Lady Gaga.

That’s the topic of my CNN column this week.

Read the full column at CNN.com >>

More About: apple, cnn, itunes, itunes ping, Ping, social media, social networking

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