Stewart Butterfield made his name as one of the co-founders of online photo-sharing hub Flickr. But after a bizarre leaving memo in mid 2008 — in which he said Flickr was made from tin, that he had worked there for 87 years and had left to tend to his alpaca herd — he’s finally surfaced and taken the cover off his latest web venture.

Turns out it’s a massively multiplayer online Flash game called Glitch. Set in a surreal, utopian world, friends can collaborate to solve puzzles and work together, not against each other.

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With well over 100,000 apps available for the iPhone, and counting, it gets harder and harder to find exactly what you’re looking for on Apple’s App Store.

There are certainly handy archives out there, cataloguing the best games, productivity tools, musical toys and free releases, but if you’re looking for drop-dead gorgeous design and effortless user interfaces, Jason Fields might have the gallery for you: App.itize.us.

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Google says there’s already plenty of social networking information out there, and what the world really needs is a way to wrangle Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to tame information overload. If its “solution” guts the existing players, so much the better for the search giant.

Google has largely failed in its attempts to build a social networking site before, so it’s taking a different tack: With the Tuesday launch of Google Buzz, the company is pushing a new way to organise by building on a “destination” that millions of people already visit constantly, every day: Gmail.

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You’re looking at a Google snowmobile. But more specifically, you’re looking at a Google snowmobile mounted with a Google Street View camera system. Believe it or not, this unique creation will be used to bring you closer than ever to the Winter Olympics.

The Vancouver Games are set to begin in a matter of days. To celebrate, Google built this one-off contraption to photograph the crystalline water ice which carpets the downhill slopes of Vancouver’s Whistler resort at “street” level. Google even replaced the “yellow man” Street View map marker with a yellow man on skis. Aww.

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The source code for the ten-year old Symbian platform will be completely open source and available for free starting today. The transition from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history, claims the Symbian Foundation.

“The dominant operating system provider out there is Symbian,” says Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, “and now we are offering developers the ability to do so much more.”

Symbian, which powers most of Nokia’s phones, has been shipped in more than 330 million devices worldwide. But in the last few years, Symbian has seen more than its fair share of changes. In 2008, Nokia, one of Symbian’s largest customers, acquired a major share in the company. Nokia then created the Symbian Foundation to distribute the platform as an open source project, and began the process of opening up the source code that year.

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