Your Twitter stream (and, soon, your history of Facebook wall posts) constitutes a rich source of information about you, or, considering that most Tweets are public, just about anyone else. It includes everything from your speech patterns and the topics you obsess over to the identity of your "real" friends--at least in the tweet-o-sphere.

The trick is unlocking it.The first step to jacking into your subconscious is to download a representative sample of your tweets. Fortunately, Twitter stores the last 3,200 of them, which is probably more than you've ever spouted, unless you're especially prolific.One easy way to download all those tweets is to sign up for a service like BackupMy.Net, which will grab all available tweets (up to that 3,200 limit) and allow you to download them in a number of different formats.Step two, get yourself a free copy of TextWrangler (if you're on a Mac) or its Windows equivalent. [Read the full article]

The Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters of the game company SCVNGR (pron. scavenger) is a hand-me-down from the French phone company Orange--a lavish custom-built affair with bamboo gardens and a "war room" equipped with moving walls. This is also where Google's Android platform was later conceived. Now the workspace belongs to Seth Priebatsch, the 21-year-old "chief ninja" of SCVNGR, a startup that aims "to build a game layer on top of the world." The hyperkinetic entrepreneur informs me that people can get points in a SCVNGR game by climbing onto the roof of the building and leaping over the bamboo canes. He's done it.Amidst such silliness, Priebatsch hopes he's found a business model that will finally unleash the marketing power of the smart phones that hundreds of millions of people now carry everywhere. [Read the full article]

Electrovibration was first proposed for touch screens in the 1950s, but the approach didn't see widespread use because the screens didn't achieve commercial success until recently. Now, with many researchers looking for ways to improve the now-popular screens, other groups have also rediscovered electrovibration. Nokia recently announced a smartphone prototype that uses the approach. And a Finnish company called Senseg has also implemented electrovibration in touch screens, having closed deals with three companies to incorporate the technology into products that could be available in 2011.Researchers have bigger plans for multi-touch screens than the novel interface on Apple's iPhone. [Read the full article]

For years solar companies have wanted to make lightweight, flexible panels that are cheap to ship and easy to install (by unrolling them over large areas). But they've been held up by a lack of good and affordable glass substitutes.Now 3M thinks it's found a solution. This week the company unveiled a plastic film that it says can rival glass in its ability to protect the active materials in solar cells from the elements and save money for manufacturers and their customers.The protective film is a multilayer, fluoropolymer-based sheet that can replace glass as the protective front cover of solar panels, says Derek DeScioli, business development manager for 3M's renewable energy division. Manufacturers laminate the sheets onto the solar panels to seal them tight and shield them from moisture and other weather elements that can be deadly to the solar cells inside. [Read the full article]