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Imagine if the tens of millions who give time and money to tending their Farmville game were instead working for social change. A team of Hollywood's elite talent has been working with an army of advisors for six years to create a game building infrastructure that will make it so.

Armchair Revolutionary is a social gaming and strategic crowdsourcing concept that's based on real life social needs. The games are designed to connect the real-time Web to real-time social change.

What applications are the earliest testers of the Apple iPad trying out? Even though the "official" launch day for the new slate touchscreen computer isn't until tomorrow, April 3rd, several journalists and even some celebrities have already got their hands on one. And what are the top applications for folks like this? There are the usual suspects, of course: The Wall St. Journal, iBooks, Netflix (yes, it was true!), USA Today, ABC Player, NYT Editors' Choice, NPR and others. But all these apps are free, big-name brands and precisely the sorts of things the iPad was designed for. What's more interesting is a glance at the paid applications list for the iPad.

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.

A federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday is charging an iPhone development firm with collecting users' cell phone numbers without their permission. The developer, a game-making firm by the name of Storm8, is the entity behind popular games like iMobsters, World War, Racing Live, Vampires Live, Kingdoms Live, Zombies Live and Rockstars Live, among others. The company has five titles ranked in the top 50 free apps list in iTunes and seven titles in the top 100.

According to the pending class-action suit, Storm8 used a well-known backdoor method to "access, collect, and transmit" the wireless phone numbers belonging to their software's users.

Now the company has publicly responded to the suit by posting on their forums a sort of mea culpa as well as their plans to ask for a dismissal of the lawsuit due to its "complete lack of merit."

At today's Unite Conference, game dev platform provider Unity Technologies announced it will be releasing the latest build of its Unity Platform and making a previous version available at the low, low price of free.

All platforms allow developers to create games for PCs, Macs, Nintendo Wiis, and iPhones. The free version, formerly known as Unity Indie, was previously priced at $199. Broke and/or stingy devs are welcomed to download the platform here. The pro version of Unity's platform will continue to sell for around $1,500.

For once the Bay Area Rapid Transit service has more to brag about than its endless supply of used under-the-seat bubble gum and noxious mystery smells. According to its site, Bay Area Rapid Transit will be the first transit agency to partner with location-based game sensation Foursquare.