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High school and college students in the US are going crazy over a brand new app. Aptly dubbed as Whisper, this iOS program lets people anonymously share their deepest secrets via digital postcards, according to a report in The Business Insider.

Everybody has secrets, but nobody likes people to judge them. This new app lets you send messages, place a “heart” on secrets you like, and reply by sending in your own confession, all without having to tell anyone who you really are.

While the first whisper doesn’t cost anything, you will have to pay for a monthly subscription fee if you want to continue messaging others. After all, telling secrets always come with a price.

Whisper rekindles memories of PostSecret, the snail-mail community that allowed people to anonymously reveal their secrets via postcards. It was so popular that an iOS version was unveiled in September 2011, but it was subsequently axed from the App Store due to inappropriate content.

“Those memories are kind of bittersweet for me,” said Frank Warren, founder of PostSecret, adding, “It had a short but brilliant life.”

The PostSecret app was well received by users, with millions of secrets out on the web in just three months. Many of those were really deep and moving, he noted. However, once abusive content started spreading, Warren needed to shut it down for good.

This is why the new Whisper app has a feature for flagging malicious content. Despite this, the platform has already ignited several quarrels at Marathon High School in New York and a secondary school in South Florida.

Note that if you’re addicted to retro games or easily get hooked or obsessed with fun games, then you should just skip reading this now.  I’m about to introduce you to the most addictive game of the year.. Smagnetron.

This game takes you through the universe in a ship that uses magnetic forces to propel and guide itself through the cosmos.  You, of course, have to be astute enough to harness the power of physics to maneuver this craft, the Smagnetron.

On each level, you’ll have access to things like g-spinners, ejectors, injectors, reversers, rotators, and more.  The faster you get through to the end of the level, the more crystals you earn and so the more you’ll be able to buy to upgrade your ship.

There are over 100 levels in all, each in one of five constellations: Ursa Major, Scorpius, Pegasus, Taurus and Cassiopeia.  The visuals are all retro and very cool, with sound effects to match.  The real hook here, though, is the awesome hypnotic soundtrack to go with the thoughtful game play.

The game is available in the App Store for both iPhone and iPad.  It uses the entire Retina display (if you have it), so it’s highly engaging on the new iPhone.

This is a very addicting game that will have you playing for hours.

Hewlett-Packard is making a bold move into tablets, jumping on the Android bandwagon with the hot new entry-level HP Slate 7, which will hit stores in April at only $169.  It’s a low-end tablet, so the specifications aren’t exactly mind-blowing, but the fact that they’re entering the space with and Android quickly became big news in the blogosphere.

The Slate 7 is a 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.  It has a soft-touch exterior for easy grip, a dual-core 1.6GHz ARM Cortex-A9 chip and a 1024×600 FFS+ LCD touchscreen.  With just 1GB of RAM and 8GB of solid state internal storage (expandable with microSD, of course), though, it’s not exactly an iPad killer.  It’s meant for the lower-end market, however, and there will likely do well with its dual cameras (3MP rear, VGA front cam), WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1, stereo speakers with Beats Audio, and a weight of under a pound.  It has about five hours of video playback battery (roughly 8 hours of “normal” use) and is meant to compete with other 7-inchers like the Nexus 7 – a tablet which outclasses it in many respects, but has the huge disadvantage of not having a micoSD port).

For the low-end business user, HP threw in a couple of additional bonuses, which hinge around integrated ePrint for direct-from-device printing to HP printers with WiFi or Bluetooth enabled (including on a network).

Further, this is just HP’s first release in its tablet foray.  The company has made it clear that this entry-level Slate 7 is just the first of several Android-based tablets to come.  Expect them to re-enter the iPad war sometime this year with a higher-end entry to take over where the failed TouchPad lost in 2011.

Whatever your view of the Slate 7, it’s exciting to see more entries into the tablet market as competitiveness always brings on better products and pricing.

Private isn’t always, well, private.  Most of us are aware that anytime we share content with a social media site, there is a good chance it will not be kept private.  It’s easy to accidentally mis-label a shared video, for example, and make it public or that policies at a venue will change and your formerly-private vid will now be publicly visible.

To combat this, sharing videos and sending secure text messages has now become much easier thanks to ZipaClip.  This secure app sends your encrypted videos to a cloud server run by the app’s maker.  It then sends a secure text message to your recipient(s).  If they also have ZipaClip installed, they can tap to download the encrypted video and play it on their phone or iPad.

The app works only in iOS and allows 30 second or shorter clips free of charge.  Longer clips require purchase of more secured storage.  You can purchase that at $0.99 for twenty minutes or $5.99 for 120 minutes.  ZipaClip will store your videos as long as you’d like (and have space) and you can easily use the app to delete or retrieve videos as you need. The app also allows users to “ZipBack” a video or text at any time, so that it can no longer be viewed or read by any of the recipients. They will still have the text alert, but the download will no longer work for them.

While ZipaClip has its limitations (mainly being limited to the iPhone and iPad for both sending and receiving), the app is highly useful if you need secure exchanges or sharing.

Recently, a friend introduced me to the Internet Music Video Database (IMVDb) and I’ve been hooked ever since.  It’s an open music video database with thousands of videos, song lists, trivia, and more about artists around the world.  These are added by users, music producers, and the bands themselves.

IMVDb is socially-driven and works in a way similar to the IMDB we’re familiar with for movies.  Most of the information on the site is from fans of the musicians and videographers featured.

With the site, users can find out who produced, edited, choreographed, etc. any video in the database.  It’s an amazing resource for fans who want to know every detail about the genre and for film and music students interested in who the major players in the business might be.

IMVDb was founded by Adam Fairholm and Doug Klinger.  It began as a blog called FilmedInsert, created and written by Fairholm.  That morphed into a database and eventually into the site as it is now with Fairholm acting as the developer.  Klinger came in as content director to build content on the site.

Users can create a profile, find others with similar interests in music or video production, add their own information to existing entries or create new ones.

To avoid copyright infringements, the videos on IMVDb point to official sources (often they are YouTube embeds from the artist’s official stream).  The information surrounding the videos, including trivia and accounts, are what the site is all about.

The best way to get acquainted with IMVDb is to go to the site and click on Videos and go to a random video.  This will bring up a random offering and give you an idea of the kind of information you can find in their database.  Watch out, though.  You’ll get addicted.

Zynga and Facebook are trying to put a few limits on their friendship as the two have decided to revise the five-year agreement inked in late 2010. Although the amendment relaxes the restrictions for both companies, it makes their relationship a tad distant, said CNN.

The new contract gives Facebook some wings to develop its own online games. This part is definitely not a blessing for Zynga, given the online games developer’s weak 2012 outlook due to poor performance from some of its games.

However, Facebook ruled out any plans to develop games, saying they would prefer to focus on being a platform where apps and games are built. This could give Zynga a sigh of relief, especially after its shares dropped 11 per cent during after-hours trading last week, while those of Facebook remained flat.

Meanwhile, most of the amendments in the revised contract were beneficial to Zynga as certain restrictions were removed. For one, Facebook will no longer be the exclusive platform that gamers need to go through to access Zynga’s online games. They can now log in to the recently introduced portal www.zynga.com, which the FarmVille-maker plans to develop into a standalone gaming portal.

Even better, Zynga games will no longer display Facebook ads and its website is no longer compelled to use the social networking giant’s virtual payment system. Notably, this system provides Facebook a 30 per cent share of all sales that go through it.

Aside from that, Zynga is no longer forced to use Facebook as the main “non-Zynga platform.” However, newly unveiled games by Zynga should be concurrently launched on Facebook.