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"Filters that turn your face into a puppy's face and other silly effects have only been around on Snapchat for about a year. Now Snapchat is expanding those filters by letting users change the world around them. The company launched new World Lenses today, filters that can be applied to the world around you by placing 3D objects you can manipulate in your snaps."

Quadstreaker is a location app based not around nudity (though levels in the game are called "bare," "undercover," "commando," etc.), but around connecting real-world "streaks" by physically visiting square areas on a map grid. The point is to go lots of places in order to fill in your own world map and compete against friends.

Tilt World partnered with non-profit WeForest -- points Tilt World players earn in the game help buy real seeds and trees to aid with reforestation efforts in Madagascar.

Looking at the state of virtual worlds sans Second Life/World of Warcraft

On entering the site, users begin to travel through the world of Harry Potter and the [Sorceror's] Stone, following in the footsteps of Harry and learning new facts about his world as they open an account at the goblin bank Gringotts, travel up and down Diagon Alley shopping for equipment for school and choosing a wand. Unlocking new content as they progress through the storyline, they can click on and collect items for their "trunk," build and evolve their profiles, adding their own drawings, collecting books and chocolate frog cards, learning spells and brewing potions. A Pottermore account can also be connected to a Facebook account, with users able to make friends-and even take part in wizarding duels once they reach a certain point on the website.

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Sony's PlayStation 3 virtual world, Home, has 14 million registered users, and now the company is teaming with social games company, Codename, to produce social games within the virtual world.

Sports-themed virtual world for kids. Partnering with EB Brands to create real world sports gear with the FunGoPlay brand. Physical products linked to virtual word to track physical activity, etc.

Minimonos is a kids website that rewards users for being eco-friendly both in- and out-of-game. The EcoMonkey program provides kids with in-world rewards for real-world eco-actions.

"While at least Life-magazine-killer TV has served as a platform for the creation of some great artworks (HBO's "The Wire," created by newspaperman-turned-TV-auteur David Simon, comes to mind) and inspired the creation of new art forms (see the upcoming Smithsonian retrospective of the work of "father of video art" Nam June Paik), it's hard to imagine what of lasting value hot web-native media brands like Gawker and BuzzFeed are contributing to visual culture and art history. Which brings me to an email I got last Wednesday from Gawker promoting its "top story" of Dec. 5., titled "The 13 Most Powerful Images of Naked Celebrities of 2012," which quickly racked up more than a million page views. It was a sequel to a Gawker post from the previous day titled "The 19 Most Powerful Images of 2012," which was mostly a shameless, edited-down rip-off of a BuzzFeed post titled "The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2012," consisting of intense wire-service photojournalism from Reuters, the AP, Getty and others, which derive most of their support from old-school print-centric publications around the world. Gawker's excuse for its act of, uh, curation: "Who has time to scroll through 45 pictures?""

The new features, styled Search plus Your World, were announced on a blog post today and come in three prongs. The first is the inclusion of "personal results" in the return to search queries. These results are based on what a user has shared through pictures on Picasa and on Google+ posts.  The second item in Google's new bag of tricks is a new type of search results that can flush out friends who have common names.  The final new feature is called People and Places and aspires to offer a sense of community by returning a list of new connections in response to generic queries like "music" or "baseball." 

Another look at World Cup and social media. This article also mentions Facebook activity surrounding the World Cup such as status updates and views of the "Write the Future" Nike campaign.

Augmented reality game for kids!!!!!!

This week mobile developer Hudson Soft announced a new augmented reality game for iPhone, AR Monster. The game will not only support Aurora Feint's OpenFeint platform, but will feature monsters from the iPhone RPG Aurora Feint 3 in a content update.  AR Monster is a game where players use the iPhone camera to discover and battle monsters "hidden" in the real world environment. The game uses the iPhone's GPS system to populate real-world locations with virtual monsters from an initial library of over 600 creatures. Used in daily 6.21

daily 10.5

Will the internet and the world merge into augmented reality?

instagram growth... 54% of top 100 brands in the world using instagram