geekosystem

In case you missed it, Google's Android Jelly Bean 4.2 operating system shipped with a minor flaw: The month of December was missing. It didn't affect everything, but the People app suddenly decided that November flowed straight into January like some kind of Monty Python sketch. Suddenly, all of the birthdays and anniversaries during the twelfth month were forgotten. Google's promised to return December to the afflicted operating system, because they clearly have the ability to manipulate time and space. Also, it's their operating system.

Today, the road all runners come. Tiny Speck's Glitch, which we've previously described as "a browser-centric, Flash-based, social MMORPG," has finally decided to call it quits. The company's posted a shutdown notice to the site that practically drips with sadness and humility. The game itself will close on December 9th, meaning the eleven giants must be dying, but the forums will live on until the end of the year so players can connect with one another before it's gone entirely.

After going live about 2 months ago, unapologetically unconventional browser-based MMO Glitch is making an unapologetically unconventional move and unlaunching. That's right, it is going back to beta. The game isn't going to stop running or anything, but performance may get a little weirder while developers slather on a whole new set of skills, mechanics, and other features. Anyone who purchased a subscription is welcomed to a full refund, and the development team promises that this is actually a forward movement. They just need to go back to beta for a while so they can focus on improvement instead of scaling for growth.

Glitch went live today at 1pm EST, and having played the beta, I'm going to say that you should check it out. What is Glitch you ask? Well, if you're asking that, you must have missed out on this lovely little trailer (which you should watch immediately and then walk around singing for the rest of the day) so I'll give you the skinny as best I can. Glitch is a lot of things.

First of all, Glitch is a browser-centric, Flash-based, social MMORPG developed by Tiny Speck (aka those guys from Flickr) and Keita Takahashi (aka that dude from Katamari Damacy). Weird combination, I know. Glitch has a strong social gaming influence. You can taste the FarmVille if you're trying to, but there's also considerably more depth. Learning skills involves the standard "click the learn button, wait X hours" behavior common to browser-based games, but there is also a strong avatar-based world. In the world, you run around doing bizarre things like nibbling piggies (both of those words are specific, technical terms; I'm not trying to be cute) milking butterflies, playing music for crabs, and squeezing chickens as well as more conventional things like making food, earning money, mining minerals, and saving up for a house.

Ever since the early days of the Fail Whale, Twitter has earned, perhaps rightly, a reputation of not being the stablest of web services. The advent of today's "forced follow" Twitter bug, which allowed users to very easily force anyone to follow them on Twitter, is not likely to help that reputation -- nor is the fact that in combatting it, Twitter has temporarily reset follower and following counts to zero.