Amazon announced today its new Friends and Family Gifting service. In essence, it reminds customers when important birthdays, holidays, and special occasions are coming up, and what kind of gifts to get. Here’s the full breakdown of all the features:

It’s a useful service, but one that seems kind of useless in today’s world of gift cards. I can’t even remember the last time I received a gift outside of my immediate family. It’s more convenient to just dump some cash on a gift card, and toss it in a birthday card. Is it thoughtful? Not really, but when has gift giving been a thoughtful process?

If you revel in the gift giving process, you can start adding friends and family to your Amazon shopping experience here.

On November 5, 2007, the Open Handset Alliance, a group of companies including Google, T-Mobile and HTC, announced the Android operating system as its first product. It wasn’t until a year later that the first Android phone – the HTC Dream – was made available on October 22, 2008.

The operating system has come a long way since the HTC Dream’s Android 1.0. The OS was still in its infancy, and HTC’s hardware resembled the BlackBerry more than the touch phones that Apple popularized. Now most Android devices are running Android 2.3 with more and more devices making the switch to Android 4.0 or 4.1 everyday.

Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android Inc, has not said anything about the momentous occasion, but other Google employees and fans are picking up the slack on Google+ and Twitter.

Dan Morrill1 hour ago

Happy Birthday Android! Five years is quite a milestone.

I had a poem all worked out about "remember remember the fifth of November", but it was kind of lame so I spared you. You can thank me later.

Edit: Limerick form, for +Jann Van Hamersveld:
 
Once a man in Mountain View
Gazed upon phones and said "Eew!"
"This crap is so closed!"
"The industry's hosed."
+Andy Rubin knew just what to do. 75    8 Powered by socialditto

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Marshall Zanella
@ShinjiElric

Apparently it’s also Android’s birthday. This awesome mobile OS turns 5 today!

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35 seconds ago via web · powered by @socialditto

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outb0x
@outb0x

Android turned 5 years old today. Happy Birthday @Android! http://t.co/fvuM7D2O

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3 hours ago via Boid for Android · powered by @socialditto

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Dan Muse
@dmuse

#Android is old enough for kindergarten. Happy 5th birthday to #Google‘s OS. Check out the photo album. http://t.co/hF7W2UHx via @CIOonline

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3 days ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

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Abhishek L
@abhishekl

Your friendly neighborhood robot turns 5 years today. Happy Birthday #android

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1 hour ago via web · powered by @socialditto

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Chitra Narayanan
@ndcnn

happy birthday android! For a five year old, you do make the world dance to your touch!

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1 hour ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® · powered by @socialditto

[image: PLeia2/Flickr]

Either way, Skype turned nine-years-old today. The company saw fit to celebrate with a congratulatory pat on the back blog post exclaiming how far they’ve come. To be fair, Skype has come along way since their humble beginnings.

Skype has grown from an exclusive desktop application to an application that appears on everything, including the wide range of Android and iOS devices. Their success led to a successful purchase of the company by Microsoft in 2011. Now they’re hitting over 250 million active users per month.

The service hasn’t reached this point in its life without hitting a few obstacles along the way though. Just last month, Skype was being accused of funneling private conversations to law enforcement. The company outright denied those claims, but some people still view them being owned by Microsoft as only a bad thing for the privacy of users.

Birthdays are never a time to focus on the bad. To help celebrate their birthday, the folks at Skype created a huge infographic that charts the company’s history from its founding in 2003 to the present day. You might even find yourself learning more about Skype than you ever thought possible.

The Internet turns 21-years-old today. Our favorite form of communication has just graduated college and is now ready to finally make a name for itself out there. If you know anything about history, you know that the Internet itself is way older than that. Developing the system to allow computers to communicate over great distances has been around since the late 60s. It wasn’t until 1991 though that the Internet started on its path toward mass proliferation and consumption.

The Internet that we all know and love today was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who now works for the Open Data Institute in the UK government. He is considered the father of the Internet and for good reason. He created the first publicly available Web page that detailed what he called the “World Wide Web.” What was originally intended to facilitate communication between researchers turned out to be something much more.

What’s really interesting is how we can look at the development of the Internet like the development of our own culture and civilization. The Internet started out small and then began to grow as Web pages moved out and expanded beyond it early boundaries. Empires like GeoCities, NetScape and those limitless AOL free trial CDs all died and gave birth to the new age of the Internet which includes the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These services will surely continue to evolve and might even give way to more popular and powerful services in the future.

The Internet, in its relatively short time on this Earth, has already done more to advance the spread of knowledge and spark imagination than any other technology on the planet. The Internet allows us to visit places that we never thought possible in our lifetimes. It allows us to learn from the greatest minds on the planet without having to lift a finger. It even allows us to keep those in power in check through more means than ever before.

It’s exciting to think about what the future holds for the Internet. Unfortunately, that excitement is limited by a lot of fear. The Internet has become a powerful tool that threatens a lot of powerful people who wish to see it regulated or stopped outright. The Internet is something worth protecting. You may have heard the expression, “Only the good die young.” The Internet isn’t just good, it’s our most precious asset. It deserves to live as long as we can allow it.

[h/t: Wired]

According to the folks at Celebuzz, Loeb popped the question to Vergara while attending her 40th birthday party at the Mayan archeological ruins of Chichen Itza. After all, if you’re going to party precisely like it’s your birthday, why not host the festivities at an ancient locale? Apparently quite a few people were in attendance to witness this proposal, which comes after almost two years of dating. Minus the recent split, of course.

In addition to numerous family and friends, the couple shared this extremely special moment with a few members of the “Modern Family” cast, specifically Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Julie Bowen, and Sarah Hyland. If everything goes as planned, this will be the second marriage for Vergara, who was previously married to Joe Gonzalez from 1991 to 1993. I suppose there are worse ways to celebrate your 40th birthday.

Curious to hear people’s thoughts regarding Sofia’s engagement/40th birthday celebration? Have a look at some comments straight from the bowels of Twitter. All of them are embedded below.

Follow @JamieJPernal

Jamie Pernal
@JamieJPernal

Sofia Vergara is engaged. Happy for her, but since I’ve long harbored a gigantic lezzie crush on her I can’t help feeling somewhat scorned

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18 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

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cabbie richards
@therealcabbie

Hapy 40th Birthday Sofia Vergara. On behalf of all men, thank you for giving us the gift of you.

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18 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

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Chase Mitchell
@ChaseMit

Sofia Vergara is engaged. The wedding will be held in the imaginary part of Colombia where people talk like that.

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53 minutes ago via web · powered by @socialditto

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Tuks FM 107.2 News
@TuksFMNews

For those hoping that one day they would land up with Sofia Vergara, sorry for you, because she just got engaged. http://t.co/QAcWM0cr

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1 hour ago via web · powered by @socialditto

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Galaxie magazine
@galaxiemag

Sofia Vergara is engaged with businessman boyfriend Nick Loeb. Aww… congrats.

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3 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Moritz Tolxdorff, a Google+ volunteer broke the news that users will now be able to post the date of their birth on their public profiles. Of course, like on Facebook, you’ll have some control over who can and can not see it. If you want only your close friends to wish you a Happy Birthday and none of your co-workers, you have that option. You probably should just make it public so you can pretend that people actually care. You can also hide it to find out who really cares.

Moritz Tolxdorff 1 day ago

Show your Birthday on your profile!

Google is rolling out a feature to display your date of birth on your profile. As usual you can define who is able to see it.

"When you sign up for Google+, we’ll ask you to provide your birthday so that we can provide you with features like age-appropriate settings when you use Google services and personalized content. If you already have a birthday associated with your Google account, you won't be prompted to enter your birthday. By default, your birthday (day and month only) will be visible to people in your circles. You can always edit who can see it on your profile."

Help article: https://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&p=birthday&answer=1350405

#googleplusupdate   41    42 Powered by socialditto

It should be noted that you can’t use the traditional Happy Birthday song when wishing your friend a joyful birthday. The company who owns the song, Time Warner, is extremely protective of its copyright and demands thousands whenever somebody wants to use it. Might I suggest these alternatives when sending birthday wishes over Google+ or Facebook.

On second thought, scratch the Birthday songs. You should just hold a rockin’ guitar contest with the winner handing over his guitar to the birthday boy/girl.

In addition to tackling Disney’s upcoming feature “Maleficent”, a film in which Jolie stars as titular character in a retelling of “Sleep Beauty”, Angelina has also joined forces with Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague in order to battle sexual violence. I’m getting a little winded just reading about everything that she’s accomplished, which, as far as I can tell, is just another day in the Jolie household.

What are Twitter users doing for Angelina’s birthday? They’re sending the talented actress dozens upon dozens of well wishes, of course. If you have a Twitter account, why not send some love in her general direction? Before doing so, you can sample what others are saying by investigating the posts nestled below.

To celebrate its seventh birthday, YouTube has created a video to commemorate the occasion. The video shows highlights from the company’s seven-year history, including LonelyGirl15, OK Go videos, and David after Dentist. If you have been on the internet for any significant length of time, the video will certainly make you smile. Here’s YouTube’s message to its fans, taken from the video description:

On Monday, May 21, we celebrate seven years since we first shared YouTube with the world. To commemorate this occasion, here’s an updated video with some of the crazy statistics and incredible things you’ve been a part of in that time. Thanks for the amazing things you watch, create, and share!

YouTube released the video in a blog post on the Official YouTube Blog. It was announced in the post that YouTube now has 72 hours of video uploaded to site every minute. From the blog post:

Like many 7 year olds around the world, we’re growing up so fast! In other words, every single minute you now upload three whole days worth of video instead of two. That’s 61 Royal Wedding Ceremonies, 841 Bad Romances, and 1,194 Nyan Cats.

That is a massive amount of video. 4320 days worth of video uploaded every day. Google has to be commended for being able to sustain that type of growth. Take a look at the birthday video below and reminisce about the more innocent days of YouTube:

As Minecraft Forums points out, the game now has 28 million registered users and almost 6 million purchases copies. Minecraft Pocket Edition now has over a million sales and the Xbox 360 version of the title broke all kinds of records when it launched last week.

While we look back and celebrate the success of Minecraft, I think it’s more important to see what Minecraft has done for the indie movement. Notch, the creator of Minecraft, has become a worldwide celebrity. His studio, Mojang, is well respected around the world and has the potential to become the next Valve.

Other indie efforts and their creators have been equally praised, but Notch brought that success to the player. There was no “I did this,” it was a “We did this.” There’s a reason the community around Minecraft is so strong. Mojang treated its players with respect. When a player was offering free copies of Minecraft, Notch settled it through a Quake 3 match. Even before the match started, the player took down the site offering the free copies. That’s how much respect the man has earned.

While Notch has moved onto other projects, Minecraft will still continue evolving as a game. Mojang is continuously adding improvements while the community creates mods that cover everything from textures to gameplay enhancements.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not the biggest fan of Minecraft. It’s just not for me, but I do respect it more than any other game from the past decade. It has done more for the indie movement and gaming in general than any other title. In the past three years, it proved that graphics and scripted sequences are not what’s driving this industry. Giving players the freedom of choice to do what they want, when they want is what Minecraft accomplished and is driving the rest of the industry to that kind of freedom.

Minecraft Forums was kind enough to dig up the very first video of Minecraft. Back then, it was just a simple tech demo that Notch had built. It wasn’t even called Minecraft, it was just simply titled, “Cave game.” Here’s the original text:

This is a very early test of an Infiniminer clone I’m working on. It will have more resource management and materials, if I ever get around to finishing it.

It currently runs at about 700 fps for a 256x256x64 tile map.

As you can see, the game became so much more than what Notch originally envisioned.

Here’s to you, Minecraft. You may be barely old enough to walk, but you’ve already traveled so far. I can’t wait to see how far you’ll get in the next three years.

Wirecast for YouTube Live

A new software that comes free to YouTube Partners. It allows people to produce and stream live events directly on YouTube from their desktop. Features include the ability to capture and switch live between multiple video sources, roll in media files and add effects and overlays live. If you have livestreaming enabled, you’ll be able to download Wirecast in your YouTube account.

Publishing Flows and Real Time Analytics

A guided flow is now available to set-up and preview events before you go live. You can now see real time data like playbacks and concurrent viewers by geography and format.

Monetize Live Streams

Make money from live events with advertising or paid options. Live events can now be claimed in the video manager like any other video. Paid options and pricing can be set by country. For now, pay-per-view is only available for purchse in Canada, Japan, France, The USA and the UK.

As GigaOm notes, YouTube has been experimenting with Live pay-per-view for some time now, including a potential contract with UFC. These new features to Live may be the welcome mat for other sporting events to broadcast live on YouTube.

YouTube Live is still in the process of being rolled out, a year later. Access has not been granted to all yet, only a few select publishers. YouTube asks for patience if you haven’t been given access to the feature yet. “If you’re one of the many people who’ve asked for YouTube Live but don’t have access yet, we want to thank you very much for your patience. We’ve developed these features with the expectation many more of you will eventually use YouTube Live, and like we said last year, this process takes time to roll out broadly.”