Ok. The concept of making a font with a car through motion tracking is a bit gimmicky. But as the video shows, the process is actually interesting.

Zach Lieberman always seems to do original work with motion tracking (even for commercial projects). Plus the beat in the video by Cupp Cave is hot—I could live inside those bass + kick drum patterns.

You can download the font here. How many people can put “font driver” on their resume and actually have the experience to back it up?

If you can see past the PR and Twitter hype, there are lots of great new examples of Twitter being used effectively as a service or tool. Below are three examples of Twitter put to good use:

1. Twestival, a global networked fundraiser, seeks to raise $500K for non-profit charity:water through meet ups in 100 cities across the world. Micro donations are made through TipJoy

2. A New York Times interactive graphic maps the “location and frequency of commonly used words in Super Bowl related messages” on Twitter. This graphic is deceptively simple because it manages to create a clear narrative over time of the intersection of the game’s highlights and the themes of fans’ reactions across the United States.

3. Dell uses Twitter as an exclusive marketing channel, apparently producing “$1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts”.

Ok, so the last example isn’t exactly good in the “common good” sense. But the exclusive-deal-through-Twitter is a strong precedent for brands looking for revenue opportunities through social media services.

Do you have other examples of Twitter used effectively as a social service or tool?

This video simulates a 3D animation art-as-iPhone-app that responds to rotation of the iPhone on a flat surface. It’s clearly a fake because the iPhone can’t actually measure rotation on a flat surface like this, but the video is very well executed.

Chrome enables better memory allocation by treating processes separately (more like a modern os than a browser) and it’s open source. Handling processes separately is very important for Google because their web applications place more demands on memory usage than traditional browsers. And there’s a payoff for users too. If one web page or web app hangs, anything else you have open in Chrome won’t.

Google is investing in Chrome as an open source product not to compete with existing browsers but to encourage them to innovate with Chrome’s code to be able to better support the memory demands of Google apps.

Also, Google can now leverage their own browser on their mobile platform, Android, much like Apple is leveraging Safari on the iPhone. Hopefully this integration will result in a cohesive user experience across the new platform.

The fact that media coverage has overlooked Google’s stated positioning of Chrome, reflects the awkward choice of promoting the product with a 30+ page webcomic. I still think McCloud is a genius as a visual communicator (if you haven’t read Understanding Comics I highly recommend it), but come on Google. Why pick this medium that demands time to read and attentiveness for such an important product promotion?

Some screenshots I took of the application’s various interface states are below. This is by far the most robust iPhone app I’ve installed, and the interface paradigms are inspired more by Reason and other sequencers than by Apple.

Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference.

…

Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.

On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt.

I think of both as the 2008 versions of Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service developed by two guys at ITP years ago, that was acquired by Google in 2005, and left to dwindle until the founders quit Google in 2007:

It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.

Back in 2005, Clay Shirky broke down why Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball made sense:

* Dodgeball uses the mobile phone as its native platform, someplace Google wants to further extend it’s reach.

* Dodgeball does a better job mapping to real-world social networks than Orkut, since there’s an actual reason *not* to friend someone in db, namely that you don’t want to get spammed with 100 SMSes a night.

* Google’s mapping work is good at “Where am I?” and “Where is the gas
station?” but not so good at the question “Where are my friends?” Dodgeball is really good at that.

Given that the core Dodgeball proposition — we can mix fixed information about places and fluid information about people to create new value — improves a) the more information you have upfront and b) the more people are using it, the addition of db to Google is really good news for db, and will provide a really interesting platform for G to experiment with.

Three years later, with the explosion of location aware social applications, Google sure looks like it slept on a great idea.