ReadWriteWeb

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.