One of the newest and most popular Facebook apps making the rounds is Graffiti Wall, an application that does exactly what it says: it lets your friends tag your profile. Facebook has had its wall feature for years, allowing users to write personalized messages to one another for everyone to see. With Graffiti Wall, instead of words, you can break out your art skills and go to town on a 600-pixel wide canvas.
Once you've created your masterpiece, it will show up on your friends' Graffiti Wall, assuming they have it installed. If not, others will still be able to view it in your newsfeed.
There are a few quirks: there's no eraser, and there's not a text tool. In fact, many of the things that make simple doodling tools such as Microsoft Paint so great aren't there. There's also not an archive of your drawings, so if you hide a Graffiti Wall post it appears to be gone forever. What is there is a neat idea and has the potential for something that will spice up the Facebook's wall feature, assuming its developers are willing to keep adding new features.
Related: Drawball.
[via Digg]
Facebook's Graffiti Wall app is a veritable Pandora's box for computer art enthusiasts who feel limited by their computer's keyboard.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Fine art and kitsch have a long history of being intertwined ever since Duchamp's urinal made a splash in the art scene. In the same spirit is Mr. Picasso Head, a drag-and-drop abstract art creation tool that lets you make your own Picasso-like masterpieces.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
You control all the pieces of the face and can choose from a variety of eyes, ears, noses and hairstyles. There are some simple scale and rotation tools which let you adjust the size of facial features and which way they should be pointing. You can also change the coloring of each piece using a large color palette.
There's only one way to export your work, and that's by e-mail. It's saved in a gallery along with other people's Mr. Picasso Heads. Unfortunately the gallery is entirely in Flash, so there's no way to right-click and Save-as. There also are no thumbnails. But I'm just picking nits. It's meant to be simple fun and that's what it is.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
What is Web 2.0? It's freeing computing from the shackles of individual computers. It's using the Internet to make both machines and people part of a community. We all benefit from that. One of the side effects of Web 2.0 is that a lot of the things people do with traditional software (write, edit, plan, calculate, and so on) gets put on to the Web. Usually there's a worthwhile trade-off: we lose the speed of a local app, but in return, we get access from anywhere and features that connect us to others.
Just putting an application online doesn't mean it will live up to the promise of Web 2.0, though--especially if the app that's put online was a miserable one to being with. Case in point, CanvasPaint, a reproduction of Microsoft Paint that runs completely in a browser. Microsoft Paint is a bad app. It's hard to use and inflexible (although there are definitely Microsoft Paint savants). So why put it on the Web? Because you can, I guess.
Hats off to CanvasPaint's creator, Christopher Clay. He wrote this as an experiment, and as such, it's a neat, if incomplete (since it's missing features) piece of work. But taking a bad app and porting it to a new platform, even if it's an amazing technical feat to do so, does not make it inherently useful.
There are plenty of interesting online graphics apps, by the way. See the drawing app LithaPaint [blog post], for example. For photo retouching, the latest service is Pixer.us (easy to use, but limited features). For graphics, though, I'm still a believer in actual software, and I frequently use the free Paint.net [download].
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