The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog

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Smarter Healthcare: How Social Media is Revolutionizing Your Doctor Visits

In a move that will once again lead some to question to longevity of the URL shorteners used to shrink links on sites like Twitter, the popular Cl.igs service has announced on its blog (via CenterNetworks ) that it is shutting down. The service has tens of thousands of users and directs tens of millions of URLs per month. The site’s founder writes: On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics.

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Cli.gs URL Shortener To Shut Down

Just over a week ago, Twitter announced its fifth round of funding . While not officially disclosed, the recent cash infusion is estimated to be around $100 million . Twitter’s new estimated worth?

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Twitter’s Value: 5 Eye-Popping Stats

If you were with us last week, you witnessed a mighty battle between our two winning browsers from an earlier poll, Firefox and Chrome . Almost 9,000 votes later, Firefox emerged victorious and took the crown for Favorite Mashable Browser

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POLL: Tumblr Edges Out Posterous in Reader Vote

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here . The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

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Setster: Easy Appointment Scheduling for Your Website

Facebook’s been on a multilingual tear recently. Ever since Facebook launched its Facebook Translations app , where Facebook users could help translate the social network into the world’s many languages, Facebook has added support for everything from Hebrew to Persian to even Pirate Speak

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A Posse Ad Esse: Facebook Now Supports Latin

There’s a whole lot of translation action going on this week, with both Google and Facebook already announcing a translation product for webmasters earlier. Now Google has another translation announcement, this time bringing multi-language support right into the Google Toolbar for Firefox .

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Translate Any Site Instantly in Firefox with Google Toolbar

If you’ve been a long-time user of Twitter, you’ve probably seen the #BlameDrewsCancer hashtag. It’s part of a campaign by Drew Olanoff , who was diagnosed with cancer on May 20th of this year. Instead of wallowing about the news, he started his campaign to “beat up on Cancer” in order to spread awareness via Twitter and raise money for worthy charities, including Livestrong .

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#BlameEthansCancer: Twitter Takes on Cancer, Round 2

Google continues to work to address the threat posed by the real-time search capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook. In May, they launched “ Search Options ” to allow users to refine search results by content type and time (within the past day was the timeliest you could get), but today, they’re launching a “past hour” filter to make its index even fresher.

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Google Launches 9 New Ways to Search

It’s that time of the year again when Forbes publishes their annual list of the 400 richest Americans , and the rest of us look at the billions they own, dream away for a minute or two, and then get back to reality, remembering we’ve forgotten to pay our cell phone bill. The list isn’t really that much different from last year’s list ; when it comes to IT companies on the very top, Microsoft and Google are dominating. Bill Gates is still number one, although his wealth has shrunk by 7 billion since last year, meaning he now has a beautiful round number next to his name: 50 billion dollars.

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They’re Very, Very Rich: Microsoft and Google Top Forbes 400