Today, Google announced a site called Google For Veterans, that provides tools and assistance for those men and women that fought and continue to fight for their country.

Google’s Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, introduced the site today:

There are almost 22 million military veterans in the United States today and millions more around the world. Google has created some new tools to help these vets – and their families – find new ways of connecting online. In honor of Veteran’s Day, we’ve just announced a new YouTube channel, Vet Connect page, and a resume builder powered by Google Docs.

My father was a Tuskegee Airman and a veteran of WWII and Vietnam, so it’s important to me that Google supports veterans; I’m proud of the work we’re doing on this front.

The service encourages the brave men and women who fight for the U.S. to use Google Docs, Google+, and its other services to document their time spent in the military.

For those who are still on active duty, Google suggests its tools to connect with family members and loved ones with services such as video Hangouts in Google+.

Furthermore, Google has brought together tools to help those Veterans who are seeking jobs and other opportunities now that their time of service is over. It’s really a great offering from Google, who is smartly wrapping up all of its social services for uses that we might not have previously thought about.

In addition, YouTube has set up a “Veterans Channel” which shares stories of those who have served in the military, seeking to help others with the transition back into civilian life. Here’s a special message from the First Lady of the United States of America, Michelle Obama:

In a wonderful act of social good, Google is showing us that social media isn’t just for talking about celebrities, sharing funny videos, and complaining about your sports team. In a way that no other company has done, Google has made its services available to the masses for a host of purposes, and highlighting those who fight to keep everyone in the U.S.A. safe from war and attack is the best place to start.

➤ Google For Veterans

Owing your friends a drink or dinner is something we’ve had to personally remember, otherwise if it’s not written down anywhere promises are never fulfilled.

Developers Big Machine in the Sky want to track all of your “IOU’s” with its iOS app OU¹. It’s a brilliantly designed and clean app that will remind yourself and friends of what you owe them, and vice versa.

IOU’s are also a way to give someone a gift without giving them a run of the mill gift card. Telling someone that you’ll wash their car for them is a gift that certainly beats a $10 iTunes gift card. The OU¹ app is great for this.

Sending someone an IOU

The OU¹ app only works with your Facebook account right now, which we don’t see as a bad thing. If you’re not a Facebook user, it is a shame that the app won’t let you in any other way. Twitter would have been a good option here.

Once you’re logged in, you can send an IOU to anyone in your Facebook friend graph. Optionally, you can post it to their wall for the public to see. You can customize the message that gets sent and what you owe them, of course.

There is no real money tracked with OU¹, unlike other apps such as Venmo which allow you to use a bank account to send them money that you might owe them.

OU¹ seems to be focused around doing something nice for someone.

Tracking your IOU’s

The difficulty for OU¹, as with any app, is getting a strong user base. If someone doesn’t send me an IOU for a while, I’m more than likely to forget to use the app at all. It will be interesting to see if the company does indeed open up its service to Twitter, as that may be a faster path to an engaged user base.

If someone sends you an IOU, it’s displayed for you to review and you’re sent a push notification alerting you of it. This app definitely requires reciprocity to succeed.

What if you could find your family and friends? Today we’re launching a new app called Family and Friends.

Its new “Find my Friends” app aims to share the location of your device, and could come in handy to see where the people you care about are located.

You can set your location sharing for blocks of time:

At the end of the day, location sharing stops automatically. Easily locate friends and family, temp sharing options, simple privacy controls…

It will be interesting to see how social this app is, because the “Find my iPhone” feature is heavily integrated and very much a utility application. Could we be seeing a direct FourSquare competitor coming from Apple?

Read our full Apple roundup here, and read all of the Apple announcements here.

Planning a trip is difficult, there’s a lot of homework to do on places, especially if you’ve never been. There are a ton of books and of course you have Google to search for all of the cool places to go.

However, wouldn’t it be nice if your friends could plan your trip for you based on their experiences?

That’s what Trippy is for. The company has a site and an iOS app that lets you set a location of where you’d like to travel to. You can share that with your social graph and let people jump in and suggest places for you to go.

Trippy points out that getting advice from strangers isn’t fool proof, especially on the internet, so why not leave it up to your Facebook friends?

The company was a finalist in the TechCrunch disrupt 2011 Startup Battlefield. launched as a finalist in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011 Startup Battlefield. The company CEO and Founder, J.R. Johnson, has had 2 startups acquired by Expedia in 2008.

Start a new trippy trip

Even if you don’t have set dates on when you’d like to go to a certain location, it’s nice to dream about it, right? Trippy lets you set up as many trips as you like to share with friends. Setting up is easy, just choose a location, the reason for the travel, and pre-fill in some description on why you’re getting away if you like.

Adding the reason for travel is a nice touch, because not all of your friends have gone to these places for the same reason. Some have gone for business, for school, or for a romantic getaway. Choosing why you’re going is key, so don’t skip it.

Once you’ve set up your dream trips, you can share them to Facebook, Twitter, or just with a link through email. This link drops people on a landing page where they can sign up for Trippy and then start recommending places for you to check out. They’re given a search box for the location only, so it’s easy to start adding places for your potential itinerary.

Help your friends plan their trip

Once you’ve set your dream trips up and shared, hopefully you have some of your friends on Trippy doing the same. This makes things fun, but I fear that if none of your friends sign up, you won’t come back to the site to add more trips. Since you can post to Facebook and Twitter though, there’s a good shot that your friends will at least try the service out.

It does take a lot of work to even think about a vacation, let alone plan one, so we think Trippy might be onto something here.

In case you’re not sold yet, here’s a video from the company explaining Trippy:

The company also has an iOS app, but quite honestly I wasn’t able to figure out how to use it. I would search on locations and it would bring back results close to me in San Francisco. The user experience isn’t great on iOS app, but the website is clean and straight forward, so it might be best to stick with that.

According to a report by Gizmodo, Facebook has now exposed something that has been deep and dark for some time. What friends of yours on Facebook have unfriended you.

Some people take this very seriously, and this could cause a lot of grief for longtime pals and colleagues.

Basically, in your new Facebook Timeline, which tracks everything you’ve done on the Facebook system from the day you were born and then signed up, lets you look at your friends.

One thing is different though, it shows you what friends you’re no longer friends with, because it’s showing you the timeline of who you’ve been friends with historically. Current or not. We confirmed this today. As you’ll see, the “Add a friend” button is shown for people I’m no longer Facebook friends with.

Oops.

UPDATE 9:40pm PT
It appears as if this has been changed by Facebook, as tipped by Jesse Middleton. Perhaps Facebook didn’t intend for this to be a “feature”, and it was just an unintended bug with their latest Timeline release. See the updated image below: