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The visualization tool brings home the point that your Timeline is supposed to be a survey of your young life so far. And it makes you want to upload more and better pictures

Think you're great at getting the word about your business out there to the world? Think again. Here's what you're getting wrong.

Ancient Lives, a project of citizen scholarship Zooniverse, makes it possible for regular folks with no knowledge of Greek to help with the work of translating important ancient Greek documents. Zooniverse , the citizen-science web portal that asks users to identify lunar craters and spot merging galaxies, now brings crowd-sourced research to the humanities with its Ancient Lives project, in which casual visitors scour images of papyrus fragments, teasing out Greek letters that spell the lives of people who lived in Egypt between the ages of Alexander and Jesus. The papyrus manuscripts come from the rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, a city that flourished along the Nile between the 4th century BC and the Muslim invasion of Egypt in the 7th century AD

A new application for Facebook and iPhones lets residents of small cities submit quality-of-life complaints without picking up the phone or waiting to see someone at City Hall. It's like a cross between 311 and FarmVille--and it works

Protesters have developed a novel way of smuggling information to the outside world: trading in their mobile camera phones for small, discreet pen cameras. While Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria has not been engaging in violence on a Qadaffi-like scale, snipers have reportedly fired on peaceful protesters and civilian casualties were reported in several cities recently.

You don't need an advanced degree in physics or biology to participate in scientific research, just a curiosity about the world around you and an interest in observing, measuring and reporting what you hear and see. The Internet makes it easy these days to take part as an amateur in sophisticated science projects around the world, and now Scientific American is making it even easier for you to find the right one through our new Citizen Science initiative