Everything, it seems, is becoming collaborative. From Airbnb to RentCycle to Zipcar , we are swapping our cars, our homes, even our clothes with each other. According to Lauren Anderson from Collaborative Consumption , this change might be as profound as the industrial revolution.

Platform updates announced last week  allow developers to more effectively surface Recent Activity stories, post game high scores to the Canvas ticker, and include location information in Graph API Posts. The high score feature comes off as the most notable item for game devs, as it’s likely to increase the virality of games that rely on competitive play

After five months of beta testing, Quora has made its Quora Credits and “Ask to Answer” User Suggestions live for everyone today. All users can now earn credits for a variety of positive and user engagement-magnifying Quora behaviors like answering questions they’ve been asked to answer, getting votes on answers to questions they’ve solicited through “Ask to Answer” and getting votes on their answers to other questions. Users can also give each other credits, which is awesome and can be managed through the Credit interface here

The code for the latest version of Android — 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich — is now in the wild.

Serving as a stark reminder that there are people on the Internet who are way, way too damned clever, the guys over at the iPhone design/development house Applidium claim to have cracked open Siri to take an unsanctioned look at its ( her? his? ) inner workings.

What is it? Happy Bag Week everyone, and please kindly meet the Incase Alloy Series Compact Backpack

Here’s your daily dose of viral marketing courteous of G-Form . These guys make device cases that can seemingly survive anything — including in a drop from 500 feet and taking a bowling ball to the face

It’s no secret that batteries are holding back mobile technology. It’s nothing against the battery companies, which are surely dedicating quite a lot of R&D to improving their technology, hoping to be the first out of the gate with a vastly improved AA or rechargeable device battery. But battery density has been improving very slowly over the last few years, and advances have had to be in processor and display efficiency, in order to better use that limited store of power.

Salesforce.com has announced the acquisition of cloud computing services startup Model Metrics. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, have not been disclosed.

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead. There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality