Flame – an abstract Java painting program

Ever wonder how those neat abstract desktop backgrounds are created? Well one way to try making one yourself is with a webpage-embedded Java application called Flame. Flame allows you to use different brushes, colors and various other tricks to create abstract brushes to paint with. The interface is fun to play with and will yield some interesting results. Just a hint: the faster you move your mouse, the more random and wide your brush gets.

Try it out for yourself: Flame.

A Very Small Contribution to LastPass

Woot! We got to make a small – very small – contribution to the latest version of the LastPass plug-in. A couple of the new icons were made by me including the Safari-themed ones to match the look and feel of Apple’s Safari web browser.

If you don’t know what LastPass is, well, you should. It’s a hugely helpful password manager that has all sorts of plug-ins for different web browsers and mobile platforms. If you still use “PASSWORD123” for every login you have then you should probably consider getting this plug-in and making your life a little less hackable. I’ve used competing products and I have found LastPass to be the most feature-complete and easiest solution.

Seesmic acquires Ping.fm

Seesmic, maker of popular desktop and mobile Twitter clients, has just acquired Ping.fm — a service that lets users post to 50 social networks with a single status update — for an undisclosed sum.

The acquisition includes both talent and technology, so Ping.fm co-founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough are now Seesmic shareholders and key members of the management team. They will begin immediately integrating Ping.fm technology into Seesmic applications.

Sometime in January you can expect updates to Seesmic’s Blackberry, Android, web, Windows and OSX (via Air) apps. Each will add advanced Ping.fm integration, supporting the ability to post to 50 social networks with a single update, special Ping.fm triggers to specify posting to specific social sites, and the option of using Ping.fm’s e-mail, SMS and chat functionality.

Ping.fm currently boasts 200,000 updates a day from its 500,000 registered members. More than 100 applications already use the Ping.fm API for cross-posting purposes, and although Seesmic will assume full control of the platform, they’re committed to maintaining it and supporting the developer community.

The maneuver no doubt means that Seesmic is now infringing upon TweetDeck’s territory and mission with ambitions to be much more than just a Twitter client. Ultimately, Seesmic aims to be your primary gateway to the social web and to serve 1,000,000 updates per day in 2010.

Voyeurism in the Twitter age

Often when people tweet or post a Facebook status update from the road they accompany it with a picture or two.  These photos can range form the mundane to the fascinating with a bit of everything in between. While you may not be viewing the status updates yourself, the pictures are usually posted to a publically available service like Twitpic, yFrog, TwitrPix and others.

A site called PicFog grabs the links to these photos in real-time and presents them in a constantly updated webpage (see the photo). If you want to kill a few minutes just open up the site and let photos scroll by. Each photos has additional information associated with it, and clicking on the photo opens up a larger photo.

It’s all public although it tends to be a little creepy sometimes. That said, it’s definitely worth a look for a few minutes of mindless entertainment.

Play some classic Nintendo (NES) games in Javascript

The idea that somebody could program a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator completely in Javascript just blows my mind.

For those that don’t know, Javascript is a language of sorts that’s built into your browser. It’s usually used for doing such mundane tasks as button roll-overs, making simple screen transitions, verifying that you entered a valid e-mail address, etc. I don’t think that using it as a full-blown processor environment was ever part of the original conception.

You’ll want to use Google Chrome for this – competitor browsers aren’t quite fast enough to play this yet.

Yeah, there’s no sound on this emulator but for a quick arcade fix it’s pretty good. There are lots of other ways to play games like this, just use Google or Bing to find them.

Try the emulator here.

Top 10 tools for a free online education

It’s easy to forget these days that the internet started out as a place for academics and researchers to trade data and knowledge. Recapture the web’s brain-expanding potential with these free resources for educating yourself online.

LifeHacker has an interesting post listing some various sites where you can teach yourself a great number of things:

• Teach yourself programming
• Get a Personal MBA
• Learn to actually use Ubuntu
• Get started on a new language
• Trade your skills, find an instructor
• Academic Earth and YouTube EDU
• Teach yourself all kinds of photography
• Get an unofficial liberal arts major
• Learn an instrument
• Learn from actual college courses online

If any of the above interests you then go check out the original article at LifeHacker.

Loudcrowd Marries Gaming And Music In A Virtual World

Startup Conduit Labs has launched Loudcrowd, a online community that integrates a virtual world with social gaming and music. Loudcrowd users can create their own virtual world with avatars and access music playlists while playing a series of music-themed games with friends. Loudcrowd is launching with 50 artists and over 250 songs featured on the platform, including music from the Indie rock bands Justice, Phoenix, Santigold, and Friendly Fires.

Loudcrowd wants to create the feel of an online concert or dance club for users. The site will feature social games that will be played simultaneously with music tracks as well as daily playlists from guest DJs. Loudcrowd’s feature Dance game is similar to the popular game Dance, Dance Revolution and is pretty innovative. Loudcrowd says that the dance game has been played more than one million times since they entered private beta, with over 25 percent of users visiting the site more than 100 times a month. The games are all built on Flash and the animation is disarmingly good.

See the full article at TechCrunch.

U.S. visits to Facebook gcontinue to grow

U.S. visits to Facebook grew 149% in February compared with the same month a year earlier, according to Hitwise. That pushed Facebook’s market share among users in the United States visiting social networking sites to 36% last month – still behind MySpace, which enjoys a 52% market share despite a 28% percentage drop. MySpace also continues to lead in time spent among the top 5 social networking sites with an average 29:38 per users per month.

Market share of U.S. Internet visits to top five social networking Web sites
Rank   Name            Feb. 2008       Jan. 2009       Feb. 2009       Y/Y percent change
1     MySpace                 72.92%           57.08%              52.21%               -28%
2     Facebook               14.46%            31.15%             36.03%              149%
3     Tagged                     0.65%               2.33%               2.47%              280%
4     MyYearbook            1.17%               1.67%                1.63%              39%
5     Classmates            1.03%              0.80%               0.82%               -20%
Source: Hitwise

Average U.S. time spent among top five social networking Web sites
Rank     Name          February 2008       February 2009     Y/Y percent change
1       MySpace                 30:07                             29:38                      -2%
2       Facebook               21:00                             22:12                       6%
3       Tagged                    24:56                             26:22                      6%
4       MyYearbook            31:35                             25:22                   -20%
5       Classmates            10:19                             11:14                      9%
Source: Hitwise

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect, which allows third-party sites to add users through the Facebook friending feature, launched a Comments Box social widget to allow users to post comments that can be spread to other sites. More than 6,000 sites have integrated Facebook Connect so far and the feature continued to win converts leading up to the Oscars:

• WorldTV teamed with India’s ZoomTV to create an embeddable player and Facebook widget to allow users to watch the telecast and post comments to their friends in realtime
• Jaman.com launched a live status feed over the weekend using Facebook Connect, enabling viewers around the globe to share comments about the Oscars on the web
• CNN.com is teaming up with Facebook once again to offer live streaming and concurrent commenting during President Obama’s State of the Union Address at 9pm ET tomorrow

Source: Cynopsis: DIGITAL

MySpace Music v. YouTube: Who Really Drives More Impressions…

The music video is enjoying a newfound renaissance, thanks largely to YouTube.  Once upon a time, music videos were played on MTV, VH1, and BET, and that was that.  Now, music fans are calling the shots online, and the music video is arguably bigger than ever before in its history.

But how many views are we talking here?  Universal Music Group is the most viewed channel in the history of YouTube, with 3.4 billion views on a stock of more than 9,200 clips.  Sony Music and Hollywood Records own the second and third-place slots, respectively, and ChrisBrownTV, JonasBrothersMusic, RCARecords, and even michaeljackson are not far behind.

Suddenly, the brouhaha between Warner Music Group and YouTube makes more sense.  People love music, and even a diversified site like YouTube draws serious traffic from music-related clips.  But take a look at MySpace Music, and something interesting emerges.  Because it turns out that listening levels on MySpace Music eclipse comparable viewing levels on YouTube, often by a factor of 7-to-1.

Full story at DigitalNews