A Swedish app called Recognizr lets you point your smartphone camera at someone and retrieve their online profiles via face recognition. You don't even have to know the person, unlike with competing apps.

Here's a nice, sharp break from the cheerleading and punch-pulling for which Wall Street analysts are notorious: A financier on Garmin's last quarterly call, cussing out company for shitty margins on a product.

When the internet was young and innocent, it was acceptable to "finger" college classmates. These days, a simple Facebook "poke" can land you in jail, in Tennessee, and CNN has to say "alleged" poking, because, hey, libel.

Are you quietly stalking someone and too dense to figure out their sexual orientation from Google searches, Flickr party photos and real-life gossip? Well, a couple of MIT geniuses invented just the tool for you.

Sure, Americans preen about their commitment to freedom, but who's out there standing up for our God-given right to curse the boss on internet social networks? Australian prison guards, that's who.

When the beloved geek comic xkcd finally signed a book deal, it involved no profits and no bookstores. Now its author is taking a similarly unconventional approach to philanthropy. Sorry, poor children of Laos!

It's so hard to start a good fight on Twitter. Praise someone effusively, it gets "re-tweeted" endlessly, while nice juicy feuds get smothered in the crib. Every Twitter user is president of his own fraternity. How stale!

Wikipedia, once an internet free-for-all, has announced it will now screen changes to certain articles. The New York Times' ethics columnist, meanwhile, is joining the eternal backlash against anonymous blogging. Two steps toward a nice, peaceful, boring and neutered internet.

Paper Heart comes out in limited release today, with Michael Cera playing — surprise! — an awkward teenager in a twee comedy. Satirists have already mocked Cera's typecasting; are they overstating things? Here's a side-by-side comparison of the actor's work.

A British bureaucrat has published a guide to Twitter etiquette and strategy, intended for use throughout the government. The stiff, formal document about a casual microblogging service is generating worldwide headlines, but it's hardly the first of its kind.

Facebook is quite powerful at lubricating relationships between acquaintances. Too powerful, sometimes: the social network turned an English garden party into a riot requiring a small police army to put down.

There's some kind of sick good cop/bad cop deal going down at Yahoo. CEO Carol Bartz swears, smacks down reporters and threatens "dropkicks." Her enforcer, meanwhile, has a Pomeranian named Clio and loves David Sedaris and peach cobbler ice cream.

Marie Claire just wanted to wish everyone a "sparkling, joyful and warm holiday," but the magazine's flack forgot to Bcc, exposing precious celebrity email addresses to 582 people. Christmas is ruined!

There's a site for making post-its and a site for buying other people's drinks; there are over 50 sites to share videos in a safe place where no one will watch. But there aren't sites for the little things I really need, day to day.

Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley maker of superfast electric sports cars, has fallen behind schedule delivering its first 100 cars to the Googlionaires, George Clooney and other buyers who ponied up $100,000 apiece. Today's New York Times report by John Markoff blames battery troubles, but Tesla's blog says no, it's problems with the cars' transmissions. I feel so much better now.

A Justin.tv "lifecaster," who sports a head-mounted camera wherever he goes, is a huge jerk to a very polite movie-theater manager who asks him to remove his camera when he enters the theatre. Then he gets worked up and defensive when people call him out for his rude behavior. Ah yes, this must be what Al Gore envisioned when he invented the Internet. [TechCrunch]

The Internet is not an excuse to be boring, stupid, or cruel. Well, cruel's fine. So join me in taking the Pledge to Not Suck at the Internet. Those who pledge get no actual privilege or prize, and the false sense of superiority is a redundant prize for you, but you can maybe make a newsletter for yourselves.

What does Yahoo have in common with Spock, Gleamd, and 43 People? Like these lesser-known sites, Yahoo now lets members make profiles for non-members. And that's how I got creeped out this weekend.

I would do plenty of things for you. I'd drive you to the airport. I'd be the gunner while you drive the Warthog on Halo. I'd pretend you really can play the guitar. But I won't vote for your lame story on Digg.

Have you ever seen a social network that lets you file people under "acquaintance"? The biggest headache on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn is deciding your friend threshold. Don't take my word for it — MySpace founder Tom Anderson has a private profile, and even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg might have doubled up on his own site. Instead of making you wade through bad friend requests and pointless updates from people you don't know that well, the double-profile technique puts you in charge of your own friend network. Here's a three-step technique for splitting your online presence between your "friends" and your real friends.