Daily Dispatch: Diversity on Facebook; Dragon Search for iPhone brings speech search to multiple sources

Combing through hundreds of blog posts and news articles daily, Dirk Klingner, our technology-trend watcher, sifts through the noise to bring you the tech news most important to consumers. If you have a tip on a story you want to share, leave a comment below.

...We discovered that Facebook has always been diverse and that the diversity has increased significantly over the past year to the point where U.S. Facebook users nearly mirror the diversity of the overall population of the country. The graph above shows the proportion of the three largest minorities on Facebook over time as predicted by our model, while the dashed lines show the proportion of the Internet population for the same ethnicities.

Go thataway: Google Maps India learns to navigate like a local (Official Google Blog)

...We found that using landmarks in directions helps for two simple reasons: they are easier to see than street signs and they are easier to remember than street names. Spotting a pink building on a corner or remembering to turn after a gas station is much easier than trying to recall an unfamiliar street name.

Google Reportedly In Talks To Buy Yelp (paidContent.org)

Google may be about to make its biggest play for local business ad dollars yet. TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington says the company is in late-stage talks to buy business reviews site Yelp; he puts the price at upwards of $500 million.

The Economics of a Free Google Phone (Gizmodo)

...the Nexus One would run around $200, maybe a little more. Selling the Nexus One direct to consumers at cost—in other words, the exact same amount it costs Google to build them—by definition costs Google nothing. Even if Google were to take a massive $100 hit on every phone to sell them at $200 (or less) and wanted to push 5 million of them, it would cost Google $500 million. That's a pretty tiny of chunk of $22 billion.

Nuance launches Dragon Search for iPhone (Nuance)
The major search engines have been releasing voice search applications for mobile, but this app powered by Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation technology allows you to perform searches from a wider variety of sources including Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Twitter Search, iTunes and Wikipedia.

Very Cool: World's Largest Spherical Photo (18-Gigapixel Awesomeness) (TechCrunch)

...The record-setting photograph was created from 600 individual exposures stitched together into a single image measuring 192,000 pixels in width by 96,000 pixels in height, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

Lighter side: Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of 'Friendster' Civilization (The Onion)