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On Tuesday, as reported first by CNET, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's start-up Tiny Speck announced its new online social game, Glitch.

As described on Glitch.com, "It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the 'glitch'--a grave danger of disemprobablization. This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and … Read more

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live inside the imaginations of a group of ancient giants, get ready to play Glitch.

A new game that went into alpha testing on Tuesday, as reported exclusively by CNET, Glitch (see related behind-the-scenes feature about its development) is a puzzle-heavy, Web-based social MMO built around sending players billions of years into the past to develop the optimistic future that today seems increasingly unlikely.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, … Read more

Last July, TechCrunch ran an item about Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's recent tweet that his new company was hiring.

"Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it," he tweeted. "Work with me." And based on that tiny little missive, his until-then unknown start-up Tiny Speck was flooded with job applicants hoping they join Butterfield as he and his partners made a second attempt at catching lightning in the Web 2.0 bottle.

Of course, no one knew at that point what Tiny Speck was up to, beyond the fact that the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.

For nearly a year, they'd been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they'd sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.

But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two … Read more

Flickr, a popular photo-sharing and -hosting service owned by Yahoo, is to photos what YouTube is to video: it is the quintessential picture site. The service provides a virtual gallery (or many virtual galleries, if you prefer) where people share and explore each other's photos, and the result is an active and engaged community with a vested interest in digital photography.

Flickr offers a plethora of features, which vary depending on whether you subscribe to the free service or the pro version, which runs $24.95. Basic users can share and host hundreds of their own pictures on Flickr … Read more

Viewfinder is a desktop app that makes finding and downloading photos from Flickr much faster and easier. The app's well-designed, streamlined interface is centered, fittingly, around Flickr search results: you just type your terms into a search bar (specify text or tags in a drop-down menu), and the main window is quickly populated by results that you can preview, download, or open in Flickr using your browser. What makes this app so helpful is its ability to apply filters to your results; so, for example, you can look only at photos licensed under Creative Commons (more likely to be … Read more

Birds do it. Bees do it. It's just that these days in India it may be a little harder to watch online images of human beings doing it.

Sex is often a slightly thorny subject (well, maybe except in France). However, varying attitudes around the world to varying sexual practices mean search engines must adjust their positions accordingly.

So it may sadden some to hear of a Guardian special investigation that appears to have unearthed evidence of Microsoft and Yahoo search engines complying with a new Indian law offering severe punishment for the display of "lascivious" content.… Read more

Sites owned by Yahoo, AOL, and Google have joined Facebook and MySpace in expelling New York sex offenders from their rolls.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that Google's Orkut.com, AOL's Bebo.com, and Yahoo's Flickr.com are among 13 additional social-networking sites to use sex offender data available through New York's Electronic Securing and Targeting of Online Predators Act (E-Stop) to find and disable accounts associated with registered sex offenders.

Other companies that have agreed to cooperate include BlackPlanet.com, Classmates.com, Flixster.com, Fotolog.com, hi5.com, MyLife.com, Stickam.com, … Read more

Microsoft is apparently willing to pay Rupert Murdoch to block Google from indexing any of his company's Web sites. Are we headed toward a world where the search engine you use determines what news you get? Probably not. We explain why Murdoch may be thinking in an old fashioned limited way rather than in the current infinite Internet way. We also declare the patent office baroque, and ask it to lose weight.

Microsoft offers to pay News Corp. to “de-list” … Read more