Is just me, or is "real-time" the replacement term for "Web 2.0": you know, hideously over-used, over-hyped and prime for a square on the Internet Bullsh*t Bingo card? I mean, word has it that every man, dog and Venture Capitalist is on the real-time train now that mere mortals like parents are embracing Twitter. Continuing the real-time push is Pubsubhubbub - the real-time blog notification technology with a name that 95% of the Internet struggle to pronounce on first reading - and today it received another boost from Typepad who've enabled the technology on all their hosted blogs.

[Original Image from Dave Winer]

Web 2.0 style is its own special brand of Fugly. Hundreds of sites capitalize on the volcanically-hot design trends that signal a Web 2.0 property, but botch the job and end up looking like they were made with cookie cutters in 2007. But now, botching the job can be even easier, with Tiny Designer! You can create your own hideous Web 2.0 elements in seconds, including plenty of gradients, that ubiquitous lime-green color, and (of course) the always-popular "beta" badge.

Can you believe that the entire Tiny Designer site was made using elements from Tiny Designer? I sure can: it's atrocious. From the glossy sticky notes (why?) to the misappropriated Twitterrific bird at the bottom of the site, everything about Tiny Designer does violence to the entire idea of design. If you're not too stunned by the eyeful of horrors that is the Tiny Designer front page, launch the design gallery and see what other abominations this Frankensite hath wrought.

And all of this is to say nothing of the clunky, stilted user experience of actually attempting to make anything in Tiny Designer. The tool's disorderly UI involves a lot of toolbars stacked on top of one another, and, of course, a lot of gloss. If you thought the dismal results people produced with Tiny Designer were somehow due to user incompetence, you'll change your tune once you try to do anything with it. I'm predicting a long weekend of nightmares about the entire web being rebuilt with Tiny Designer.

Now that "web 2.0" has been around for a while, it's become apparent that even the most mundane features of desktop apps are going to be available through web-based services. You've probably seen the highlighting feature in word processors like Microsoft Word. Do you need it for web pages and blog posts, too? Markkit, the web highlighter, has got you covered.

Just drag the Markkit bookmarklet (try saying that 10 times fast) to your bookmarks toolbar, and click it whenever you want to highlight some important text on a webpage. You don't get to use a fancy highlighter icon as a cursor or anything, just select text like normal to highlight it in yellow. If you make a mistake, you can mouse over the text to reveal an "unmark" button. Your highlighted pages have their own Markkit URLs, so you can save and share them by bookmarking them in your browser or on a service like Delicious.

Don't worry, we're not going all Valleywag on our loyal readers, but with a bucket-load of photos from the Crunchies (and ensuing party) we thought it wise to separate the sober from the (Myspace-sponsored) party photos from San Francisco's City Hall. Thanks to all at TechCrunch for welcoming us Download Squad-ers to the event!

There are a lot of advantages to using the same username for all your online services. It's easier to remember, and friends can find you more easily. If you're someone who's in this habit, you might want to take a look at Usernamecheck, a site that tells you which sites your favorite username is registered at.

Usernamecheck scans 60+ different networks, from 12seconds to Zooomr, and tells you if your name is taken. The sites on the list are some of the best, most useful places to have an account, so it might remind you of something you've been meaning to sign up for. Or, if you're an Internet addict like me, it might remind you of sites you signed up for and forgot about. Either way, it's worth a look.

Flexigrid is a jQuery based way of making flexible data grids, either by inputting fresh data or grabbing it from an existing table, XML, or JSON source. The "flexi-" in Flexigrid refers to its resizable height, width and columns. Flexigrid also now has a toolbar, a search function, and its own API.

Although the API isn't documented yet, there's enough there to figure out how to do the most important things Flexigrid does: collecting and sorting your data. It'll use Ajax to populate your new grid from an XML source, and there's an auto-resizing function so you don't have to mess with your columns too much right off the bat. The CSS should also be editable, so you can hack in your own theme if you're ambitious.

Favthumbs takes a visual approach to your del.icio.us bookmarks. Instead of the usual text based links found on the Del.icio.us web site, Favthumbs displays image thumbnails of your bookmarks giving them a Web 2.0 look and feel.

No setup is required to use Favthumbs, simply enter in your del.icio.us user name and Favthumbs will generate thumbnails of all your bookmarks in either a grid or carousel (think cover flow) layout. You can further narrow down your bookmarks by clicking on your tags to the right of the screen.

We found that it took a bit longer to display our bookmarks on Favthumbs than using del.icio.us directly. This delay may be the result of Favthumbs fetching the images. But if thumbnails are your thing then you might want to give Favthumbs a try.

Ever did something that you wish you could take back? Maybe you snuck out of the convenience store without paying for that pack of gum or never returned that past due library book. Whatever the case maybe, why not voice it to the world and get it off your chest with i4Giveu.

i4Giveu is not just a sounding board, its members judge your confessions, rate them and ultimately decide if your confession is worthy of forgiveness. Of course, you too can dish out a bowl of moral soup if you're feeling a bit high and mighty.

Oh, Internet... is there anything you can't do?

Video camera equipped mobile phones are great simply because you're more likely to have it on you than a traditional video camera. The only downside is that the quality of the recording is anything but stellar. That's probably the reason why the people at MotionDSP created fixmymovie.

We're not going pretend to understand the technology behind the service but what we can tell you is that their technology does work. All you need to do is send them your video in one of 3 ways: upload to their website, email or directly from your phone via MMS. From there, fixmymovie will analyze your video attempting to clean up as much as possible and produce a video that will look a lot better than the original.

Once completed, fixmymovie will display it on your My Movies tab on the site as well as email you a link to the video. You can then share this with your friends and family members or download a copy directly to your computer.

The downloadable video comes in 2 versions: free and premium. Free downloads are limited to 640x480 and are watermarked with the fixmymoive logo. Premium downloads cost $2 and are up-scaled to 4x times the original resolution and are logo free.

We would suggest that you try out the free service first before purchasing the premium download and inspect the processed video and if you like the final results spring for the premium service!

Ok, ok, we know that when something is as powerful and useful as Google that looks shouldn't matter, but come on. Would it really be too much to ask for her to doll herself up a little? Just a little. Throw us a bone!

Fortunately, Yoozila has arrived on the scene, all AJAXed up, and shiny web 2.0 graphics to top it all off.

The results page can be quickly - and usefully - customized. Turn thumbnails on or off, filter your results by region, language, file type and license type (though it doesn't work that well on some searches yet), and of course you can search within your results.

The thumbnails can be incredibly useful; they're a good way to spot scam sites before you get suckered in to visiting or give you a visual reminder of sites you're visited before.

It's built on Google code, so you'll get the same web, image, blog, news, and other results either way. Yoozila's done an excellent job updating the old, saggy Google interface.

Anyone who has gained super powers through radiation exposure, cosmic rays, or scientific experimentation gone wrong knows how painfully difficult it can be to conceal your identity after the fact. Fortunately, there's a web site that will help you make the process much, much simpler.

Fake Name Generator does so much more than what its moniker implies. Not only will it create a (usually) convincing new name, but it'll also give you a corresponding address, phone number, mother's maiden name, phone number - even a social security and visa number. Though we're not entirely sure it's a good idea to go passing those around.

The clever engine will even piece together an email address and domain name for you AND check to see if they're available. Now that's useful. If you're going for a safe, secondary online identity you may as well have a convincing email to go along with it.

At last we're safe to use our powers for good without fear of being discovered by our nemeses!

Web based image editors have been popping up for some time now. Even the de facto image editor Photoshop couldn't resist setting up shop. But sometimes you just want to simply resize or crop a photo and not be inadated with a multitude of tools and swatches. Enter picjuice, an online image editor with simplicity in mind.

As soon as you pull up the site it's clear that "ease of use" was the main objective here. The only tools available are Crop, Resize, Flip, Rotate and Adjust.

The controls for each tools are simple as well, depending on the tool selected you either get an A or B option, a slider or in the case of the Crop tool, a cross hair to select the area you want to use. These simple controls will aid in a shorter learning curve over the more feature rich sites.

In our testing we actually found the resizing tool here better than the one available from Photoshop Express. In Express, the resized image looked jagged but not in picjuice . However, the site seemed to be only compatible with JPG or PNG files as when we tried a GIF file picjuice would hang when we tried to edit the image.

Currently in beta, picjuice joins the already crowded online imaging arena. Hopefully, its limited get down to business attitude will help to differentiate itself from the competition.

Weheartit is a fun way to share photos or videos you've seen while browsing the Internet. Others can see what you find interesting and also comment on them as well.

Weheartit works by bookmarking their I heart it bookmarklet and as you visit websites, images and videos are outlined in pink with an "add to my heart" text above it. Clicking on this link adds the image to your heart page where you can add tags, mark it NSFW or unheart the image. From there the image becomes viewable to all Weheartit members so that everyone can see what's hearting you.

The only issue we had while using the service is that it outlines all the potential images in pink and makes everything look like its February 14.