Gowalla has launched a new feature called "highlights" which it describes as "little rewards you can give to places that are important to your life". MG Siegler talks about the potential significance of such a feature.

"Where this gets really interesting is when you bring the social graph into it," he writes. "So, for example, if I check-in near a spot where a friend of mine asked his wife to marry him, I’ll get a message alerting me of that. Or if I’m looking for the best taco place in Austin, Texas, I can visit the Highlight page and see what the masses are voting for. There are a lot of potentially interesting uses for this when it starts to get populated with a lot of data."

As reported, Target is going to start selling Facebook Credits gift cards. SFGate.com has an interesting article about the implications of this, in terms of Facebook securing.

Wired looks at today’s story about a man who took hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland, and posted his demands to the web, on his site savetheplanetprotest.com – the text is still available in cached form here.

Apple announced a bunch of new things today. You may have heard. Here’s a summary.

Michael Arrington has an interesting piece about how Google has lost 118 employees to Facebook, and how the company makes counteroffers to those employees receive offers from Facebook.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb talks about why Alcatel-Lucent acquiring OpenPlug is big news.

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider reports that South Korea’s Naver has taken search in-house. Unfortunately for Yahoo (and Microsoft), it has been Yahoo’s biggest search affiliate, according to Blodget.