We've seen methods for hooking house plants up with their own Twitter account, but there's hardly anything more satisfying that building a robot to read back all those feeds from the thousands of people you're undoubtedly following. Ganzbot is a decidedly low-budget robot that relies on an Arduino Decima to control the head actions and a USB cable to receive up-to-date status information. Have a look at the innards as well as a few words being spoken just after the jump.

[Via MAKE]

Sheesh -- and we though it was something special when Teddy Ruxpin went digital. Today's mesmerizing bear just isn't remarkable unless it talks, and to make it extraordinary, it needs to vocalize your Twitter messages. The mad scientists over at 2pointhome were able to implant a circuit board, USB Bluetooth adapter, 9-volt battery and a host of other goodies into an animatronic Teddy, and after coding in a few things and pairing it up, the animal was yapping in no time flat. Head on past the break to see a video of the operation, but be warned, as it's not for the faint of heart.

[Via DailyWireless]

Trust us, this isn't the first time LocaModa's dabbled in the cellphone-controlled gadgetry game, but it's never been more friendly than it's being with the Social Jukebox. The aforesaid company has teamed up with TouchTunes in order to give patrons the ability to interact with flat-panels on TouchTunes jukeboxes. On-screen applications will include information about the song currently playing, elusive "user generated content" and even "patron photos" from their social networking profiles (scary?). For those completely absorbed in this stuff, you can even keep tabs on the interactions via data feeds from your favorite network. Twitter fights over which song ushers the drinking crowd out in a bar 1,500 miles away? What is the world coming to?

[Via textually, image courtesy of LocaModa]

Now, we don't have a whole bunch of info on Jook right now, and sure, the press photos claim that "actual products may differ from pictures," and yeah, the patents are pending. Still, it seems like the dock connector-attached unit will be bringing some Zune-style social networking features to your lonely, non-WiFi iPod. Of course, we all know how successful The Social has been in Microsoft's court -- but with the massive proliferation of iPods on the street, this might gain a little more ground. We do worry about the use of the term "music standard," the apparently-necessary headphones, and the fact that the company doesn't appear to have a website, but hey -- you never know.

According to a recently released report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a telephone study of US youths aged 12-17 found that -- get this -- kids actually put value on "non-online" meetings, such as "talking on the phone" or "hanging out." If you believe these so-called findings, 40-percent of teens say they use that archaic and confusing system of wired telephones, while 31-percent claim to spend time "in person" with friends every day, as though they're not frittering away their time on PCs, DS Lites, and cellphones -- interacting virtually, like the rest of us. Our take? Obvious youth-driven cover-up. Hear us out here. If the 'rents found out kids were growing up so socially disenfranchised, they might just take all those beautiful gadgets away. On the other hand (or OTOH, as the youngsters say on their picture calculators), we don't exactly take a telephone poll of 935 teens as empirical knowledge, so maybe it's possible that kids are pretty much the same as they've always been -- if slightly more distracted. One thing's for sure -- they'll never experience the pain of not knowing the lyrics to Rock Me Amadeus like we did.

With under a fortnight to go until Microsoft looses the Xbox 360 Fall Dashboard update on us, we're still learning even more about what it will entail. The latest tidbit touches on the oh-so-zany social networking craze, as gamers will soon be able to browse the friends lists of their pals in order to connect with old buddies or get all up in the digital grill of complete strangers. Starting on December 4th, the default setting will enable your Xbox Live friends to browse your list at will, and if that just doesn't set well with your conscience, you can hit the read link for instructions on how to spoil some fun prevent it.

[Image courtesy of Xbox]

Skype and MySpace -- that just sounds like a match made in heaven, no? If you're still scratching your head on how the two actually fit together, here's the low down: a new partnership between the pair will soon allow MySpace members to dial up other users by simply clicking a button in their profile. Of course, this is assuming you can actually find the aforementioned button in all of the site's clutter, but we digress. Starting in November, the service will reach users in some 20 countries around the globe, and while vanilla PC-to-PC calls will obviously be gratis, "premium options" such as personal phone numbers, voice mail, call forwarding and PC-to-landline / mobile calls will have an undisclosed pricetag attached. Welcome to a whole new realm of shock callin'.

We're not certain it needs to get any easier to post compromising photos to social networking sites, but apparently Panasonic's R&D labs think it's a problem in need of a giant, garish solution: say hello to the Pixi, a concept cellphone dock / cameraphone companion designed to send photos directly from your mobile to mixi, a Japanese MySpace clone. Sliding your phone into the Pixi automatically brings up your photos, and then configuring your phone and sending those latest bleary-eyed bar pics to the web is as simple as smacking one of the six touch-sensitive icons on the unit. Of course, you won't be doing this on the sly -- the unit's bright red shell with carnival-style LED chaser lights might tip off your companions, but if you can't figure out how to email photos to a website from a modern phone, you probably deserve the scorn. Check a video of the concept Pixi in action after the jump.