Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and five other former Flickr employees are joined by one Digg alum, one games expert and several freelancers in Tiny Speck, a company that’s working on an online game that has a shot at rebooting the stagnating massively multiplayer online game genre. The 2D game — called Glitch — incorporates beautiful illustrations and cutting edge game mechanics, but its most interesting features are its social aspirations and the lessons it learns from the web that its founders mastered at their previous gigs. The game itself is difficult to pin down; it’s some combination of FarmVille , MapleStory , World of Warcraft , MetaPlace and any number of other online games or virtual worlds, but it doesn’t fall anywhere on a spectrum

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GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable It’s no shocker that the web is buzzing about Google Buzz (terrible pun intended), Google’s most aggressive push into social media yet. The new social updating and aggregation feature integrates with your mobile and your Gmail, providing a service that seems like a hybrid of Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp

GMAIL USERS: You can now follow Mashable’s official Google Buzz profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/mashable It’s official: Google has just announced Google Buzz, its newest push into the social media foray. This confirms earlier reports of Gmail integrating a social status feature .

The yfrog Twitter image-sharing service can now simultaneously post to MySpace , Twitter and Facebook . You don’t have to go to each website to share that vacation pic you took; just select your image, check the boxes for the services you want to send to and click “Post It!” yfrog ranked eighth in our Twitter image service user poll two months ago, but it’s been putting up new features slowly over the past couple months, including the ability to post videos and images directly from your webcam . It also powers massively popular URL shortener bit.ly’s image-sharing functionality

Ever since the introduction of the location-aware tweet, we’ve been curious as to why Twitter wants to know where we are. The release of Local Trends holds the key to unlock that answer.

Ever since the introduction of the location-aware tweet, we’ve been curious as to why Twitter wants to know where we are. The release of Local Trends holds the key to unlock that answer