ReadWriteWeb

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his company Tiny Speck have come out today with a game they boldly assert could be "the greatest game there ever was". The massively-multiplayer, Web-based Flash game was unveiled this morning and will be opening for private alpha testing soon.

While the game will not be fully open to the public until late in 2010, the current site not only gives us a preview of what Tiny Speck has been working on, but offers a way for you to keep track of what's new and sign up to be one of the game's testers.

We love site-building and story-telling applications, and social webizens love sharing their content - particularly multimedia content - in new and compelling ways.

YouTellYou is a fun and simple tool that allows users to grab, annotate, tag and share their pictures in an online magazine-type format. Users can pull in photos from Smugmug, Facebook, Flickr or one's own computer, then go to town in a frenzy of sequences, captions and true pictorial story-weaving.

December 1 marks World AIDS Day, and every major social site around the Internet has come together to spread awareness about the disease, its transmission and available treatments.

Thanks to efforts from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, AIDS is a more visible topic today than perhaps at any other point in the history of World AIDS Day. Read on to see what each site has done and the impact this joint campaign is having on users.

We recently told you about the Flickr App garden and gave a list of five interesting apps we found using this new section of the site.

One app we didn't find - and one that brilliantly appropriates the Flickr API in a delightful, infectious user experience - is Noticings. Part game, part geotagging app, part photoblog, Noticings asks users to upload geotagged photos of interesting artifacts to Flickr. Users tag the photos "noticings;" those photos are then imported, analyzed, and scored, with extra points being awarded for those who post every day in a given week, who post photos of lost objects, or who post the first pic from a certain neighborhood. It is, as the site states, "a game of noticing the world around you."

Flickr, the ever-more-popular photo-sharing service, has a five-year history of apps built on its API. From the interesting to the useful to the pretty to the downright silly, these applications make up a colorful and varied ecosystem around the service itself.

Flickr has organized these third-party apps into a "garden," complete with user favorites, tags, descriptions and screenshots. The App Garden represents a significant evolution from the former "services" section on the user side, and the revamp includes new features for developers, who can now use the Garden as a tool to help users discover their products. Read on for details and a few spotlighted Flickr apps we thought were fun.

While most conversation aggregators are concerned with harnessing your river of data, Mozilla is breaking it down into manageable raindrops. According to a morning blog post on the Mozilla Labs site the company is launching the prototype for Raindrop 0.1, a product that they're calling "open messaging for the open web". While Mozilla's Snowl Firefox Add-On made it possible to follow streams and rivers of messages in your existing browser, Raindrop offers what appears to be a much cleaner interface and an API to hack on your own personal conversation dashboard.

Flickr just announced support for OpenStreetMap, the wiki-like mapping service that allows users to create and edit maps. Starting today, photos that are tagged with an OpenStreetMap node ID will include a link to OpenStreetMap (OSM) right underneath the photo. OSM assigns a random number to objects on its maps and Flickr can now read this number and also extract additional data about places from the OSM database. In addition, Flickr also announced that it will now support venue ID tags for the increasingly popular Foursquare service.

Say goodbye to your controlled web presence and say hello to Picasa 3.5. Google released Picasa 3.5 with a slew of new features including facial recognition and name-based batch tagging, faster geo-tagging and better web uploading functionality. The service is so good at finding your mug and tagging it that wild photos from yesteryear can resurface and wreak havoc on your reputation.

Early this morning Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz rang the NASDAQ opening bell in honor of her efforts at New York's Advertising week. Said Bartz, "Yahoo is where half a billion people come every month. They come to be entertained, they come to be informed, they come to talk to their friends and their business associates. In other words, Yahoo is the center of people's lives. That is what we are." Bartz's words are significant as the company is expected to unveil a $100 million dollar "It's You!" campaign tomorrow morning.

Well, that certainly took long enough. Despite being one of the most popular photo-sharing web sites on the net today, Flickr hasn't had an official presence in the iTunes App Store until now. The company has just launched their new iPhone application, available here, which lets you both browse and upload photos and videos from your handset.

When 20-year-old college student Firas Alkhateeb posted a picture of President Obama decked out in Joker facepaint to photo-sharing website Flickr, little did he know that he was going to be the catalyst for a major policy change in how the Yahoo-owned company will handle copyright infringement claims. However, that's exactly what happened. Thanks to massive outcry from the online community, Yahoo's legal team allowed Flickr to put the photo's web page back up. Not the image itself, mind you, but the photo's page...along with all its accompanying metadata like date posted, tags, and most importantly, user comments.

The story surrounding the infamous Obama Joker picture and how Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing service deleted it after it received a DMCA take-down notice is getting stranger by the day. According to photo blogger Thomas Hawk, who actually saw the name on the take-down notice that Flickr shared with the original poster, the name is likely "totally bogus." This is quite a disturbing development, especially because it has now become clear that Flickr does not verify the authenticity of the DMCA take-down notices it receives.

Los Angeles residents recently began seeing a new sort of Obama poster plastered across their city. Instead of promoting "hope," these posters feature U.S. President Barack Obama wearing the Joker's clown makeup from the Batman movie "The Dark Knight." Even those outside of L.A. have likely seen this image somewhere as it soon took on a viral nature, appearing both online and in other cities across the country. The politically charged (and rather disturbing) photo serves as a counterpoint to the prolific and iconic "hope" posters that became popular during Obama's campaign. Regardless of which side you favor, one thing can be said about this photo: it definitely grabs your attention.

Earlier this morning Google Books announced a program where rights owners would be given the option to modify their copyright licenses and specify them as Creative Commons (CC) works. The initiative allows writers, artists and publishers to mark their books with one of 6 CC version 3 licenses, a public domain license or the CC "no rights reserved" license.

According to a recent report, Chinese netizens are twice as likely to use chat and three times more likely to micro-blog, blog and use video conference than American users. The Netpop Research study shows that mainland Chinese citizens are "more likely to share information broadly and openly." This comes as a surprise as the country's censorship has been such a topic of contention. Nevertheless, the study estimates that up to 92% of Chinese netizens use social media, meanwhile, only 76% of US netizens do the same.

Yahoo's giant photo sharing site Flickr launched a new search interface this morning and it looks great - but searching for Creative Commons (CC) licensed photos remains buried at the bottom of the Advanced Search options. Flickr is the world's largest repository of photos using CC licenses, a system whereby creators can communicate various conditions for reuse of their creative work without requiring their further permission. Despite that, there's a lot more that Flickr could be doing to promote Creative Commons.

According to an announcement today on the Flickr blog, it's open season for image-sharing via Twitter on the gargantuan photo site.

Users can now share posted content on their Twitter accounts using a simple web-based sharing button or via email/mobile using a unique "2Twitter" email address. Although all uploaded content is tweetable, new content uploaded via the web is not auto-tweeted. Mobile uploads are only sent to Twitter if the user's 2Twitter email address is used.

Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing site, just released a nice update of its mobile site. If you have an Android phone or an iPhone (updated to the 3.0 firmware), you can now see images that were taken close to your current location. The new mobile site makes good use of some of the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 update. Specifically, it looks like Flickr's mobile site now hooks into Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Typically, developers could only access this from their own, native apps, but now, web apps are also able to access location data.

In preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4th, China has started to block a number of web sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Hotmail, and Microsoft's new search engine Bing. Tech-savvy Internet users in China, of course, know how to circumvent the Great Firewall, but for the large majority of Chinese Internet users, these sites will remain blocked for the foreseeable future. In addition to these high-profile sites, the Guardian also reports that the Great Firewall now also blocks access to more than 6,000 online forums affiliated with colleges and universities.

Current real-time search engines generally focus on just searching a single service - and typically, that service is Twitter. Scoopler, however, a Y Combinater-funded startup which launched today after a short private beta, goes far beyond that. Scoopler is a real-time meta-search tool for Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Delicious, with support for more services to follow in the future. As one would expect, search results from Twitter dominate the real-time stream, though, depending on the topic, the most interesting links often come from delicious or digg.