It’s not that Brizzly’s perfect, or that it does justice to its source material (the unassailably pretty, wonderfully lean Birdfeed)—it’s that it comes close enough, and it’s free . More

The premise of Tweet Defense is simple: The more you tweet and the more Twitter followers you gain, the stronger your tower defenses will be. Clever, though hopefully RT bonuses will come in the future. $1. [ iTunes via Kotaku ]

Yesterday’s bootleg just wasn’t enough for me. I’ve been trawling the net trying to find an official HD trailer, and got very lucky today thanks to First Showing and their code-cracking people , who deciphered a viral site and found the goods. Just nine months and eight days! [ First Showing via Den Of Geek ] UPDATE: If you want to download the trailer, mosey on over here .

Happy Birthday, Yahoo! You turned 15 today. As a present, here’s a pretty scathing assessment of you from Ditherati , compliments of Twitter. You know, your new content-sharing partner! It’s okay… everyone’s teen years are awkward.

Steve Ballmer recently revealed that he has a secret Twitter account which he uses to “blast out the scores of his kid’s high school basketball games.” We did a few quick searches and we think we may have found it. Based on a few old stories we know that Steve’s son, Sam, attends Lakeside School in Seattle, so we searched for Twitter accounts announcing scores for that school’s basketball games. There were some accounts which tweeted scores here and there, but there was one which was simply dedicated to one thing and one thing only: LakesideBball . This particular Twitter account doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the school itself, so it would make sense that an athlete’s proud parent was behind it. Possibly Steve himself?

I dunno, their Twitter account seems real sad or something, like it could use a hug. [ Twitter ]

Those crazy cats at OK Go are tugging at our heartstrings yet again , with the release of a brand new video for the song This Too Shall Pass . It takes the Rube Goldberg machine concept to another level completely. Not familiar with the Rube Goldberg machine? Oh, but you are—it’s that Mousetrap-like series of chain reactions that come from just one small action. In this case, driving a toy truck into a line of dominos.

Yesterday the Department of Defense released a memo outlining the government’s first official policy for social media access by military personnel. Somewhat surprisingly, it gives them unrestricted access to blog, Tweet, poke and ping just like everyone else. Effectively immediately, Department of Defense personnel across the board, including civilian employees and troops alike, have full access to popular new media sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest. Before the new policy was announced, appropriate internet usage was determined individual commanders, many of whom barred those in their charge from posting on blogs or accessing social media networks. Of course, there are still some measures in place to ensure that new media activity doesn’t take up bandwidth when it’s limited or compromise mission security—”cleaning my rifle on the john, lol!” is a good troop overshare; “cleaning my rifle before we storm this Taliban bunker in Marjah, lol!” is a bad troop overshare—but the Pentagon’s new policy gives the OK for uses both personal and official. It’s always heartening when our government shows itself to be forward-thinking on matters of the internet, and allowing DoD employees to use the internet to its full, inane extent is definitely a step in the right direction.

There are over 130,000 apps in the App Store . About 100,000 of those expect you to pay cash money for a download. Sometimes it’s worth it! Often, it’s not. Prof. Dealzmodo’s here to help you tell the difference.

The Astonishing Tribe ’s latest demo is Recognizr, an app that blends Polar Rose’s face recognition tech with augmented reality and social networking —point your phone’s camera at somebody’s face, and their contact info and social networks will magically appear. You have to join the Recognizr service and upload a photo to the database in order to be recognized, so it only works with people who’ve decided that, yes, if you take a head-on picture of them, it’s okay for you to see their social networking info. The prototype app’s built on Android, though Polar Rose ’s facial recognition tech will work on an iPhone 3GS too. It’s actually not really that invasive or creepy—it definitely seems even less so than another facial recognition social networking app from MWC —since it’s completely opt-in, and really, the explosion of location-based services that broadcast where you are would seem to give people more pause. Or maybe these things should bother me more. Hello, I live on the internet