links for 2007-09-05

“Dopplr is like the iPod of social net­works.” – Now that’s a great sound-bite. Con­grats to the Dopplr team for get­ting funded.

Hab­bo has paid close atten­tion to machin­i­ma I guess. They have a tool with which you can make your own movies in game and are now run­ning a contest.

I love these cute play­ful plates that encour­age adults and chil­dren alike to have some fun with their food. Via Pixelsumo.

These abstract shoot­ers make me want to own a PC again. Can’t wait to get my Mac­Book and try these.

Have been using Read­er for quite a while but some­how nev­er found this great lit­tle book­marklet that lets you skip through new items in their orig­i­nal form right in your brows­er. Have set this to command‑1 in Camino and am lov­ing it. Via James.

There’s a lot of dis­cus­sion going on about Twit­ter Blocks. I don’t think inter­faces have to be func­tion­al­ist and util­i­tar­i­an. Hav­ing a play­ful way of explor­ing data like Twit­ter’s (which is quite friv­o­lous in and of itself) makes sense to me.

“There are some things we’re just not good at and shouldn’t even attempt. A love sto­ry, for exam­ple!” GSW blogs War­ren Spec­tor’s ques­tions to judge a game idea. Good stuff, but sur­pris­ing he dis­miss­es a whole genre as a bad idea!

All the Bad Game Design­er – No Twinkie! columns by Ernest W. Adams in one place, indexed on top­ic. Great resource for anti-pat­terns in game design.

Inter­est­ing lit­tle casu­al Flash game that uses the con­cept of kar­ma as its inspi­ra­tion. Decep­tive­ly tricky to complete.