HP has just announced that it will acquire smart phone maker Palm for $1.2 billion. Palm has been troubled for some time--while the Palm Pre was an interesting smart phone with innovative software, sales remained disappointing.

HP named the Palm Pre's webOS software as a major part of its motivation for the acquisition. It's good to see webOS get a second chance. Aside from enabling HP to enter the smart phone market, it'll be interesting to see if HP finds ways to incorporate the operating system into other devices. HP has been exploring directions such as Web-connected printers, which seem like natural beneficiaries of Palm's intellectual property.

Google announced today that it has acquired Picnik, a company that provides a fully-featured Web-based photo editing application. This is the latest in a recent string of acquisitions that has also seen Google snap up the social search site Aardvark.

Picnik is a flash-based photo editor capable of real-time cropping, resizing, rotating, special effects, and other manipulations. It can pull photos from websites including Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace, or from a user's computer. The basic service is free, but the site offers a more sophisticated service for about $25 a year.

Google most likely wants to beef up its online photo-sharing service, Picasa, which currently has fairly minimal photo editing capabilities. It says it's not changing Picnik yet, but will be working on "integration and new features."

Other online photo editors include Photoshop.com, Aviary, and FotoFlexer.

Google wants social features very badly, it seems. Damon Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Aardvark, an interesting search startup that integrates social interaction and artificial intelligence, has today confirmed reports that the company has been acquired by Google.

I wrote recently about the company's approach to search--Aardvark uses artificial intelligence to find the right people to answer a user's query. It then trusts those people to provide the desired information and refine the query as needed.

I've used Aardvark a great deal in the months since, and I've found it invaluable for answering questions that benefit from human guidance or opinion. It's a great place, for example, to ask "How do I get started making electronic music?" or "What's a mind-blowing novel of first contact?"

Aardvark claims more than 90,000 users and clearly has very promising technology. But I do worry about what Google plans to do with it. Aardvark works well partly due to close integration with Facebook, and Google doesn't seem to be on the social networking company's, ahem, friends list. Google may try to transplant the technology onto one of its own social structures, such as Google Talk. In that case, the company could face some backlash from users, similar to some of the early negative reactions to the automatically generated social networks for Google's new product Buzz.