Flickr founder unveils Glitch, confirms for spring 2011

Completely mental it may be, but Stewart Butterfield's social game, Glitch, looks to have all the right stuff.

Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield has unveiled Glitch, a social game he started working on before building Flickr and selling it to Yahoo! in 2005.

You're inside cartoon giants' thoughts, apparently. There's an awful lot of sharing and Farmville-style point-spending going on in here, but there style's distinctly abstract. Looks awesome.

Speaking to Venturebeat, Butterfield described the title thus: "The initial experience is as a side-scrolling platform game, hearkening back to Mario games. That lets people get a handle on the basic control of the game.

"Stylistically, it’s a mix of all different kinds of things with contemporary illustration. It’s different from traditional console games or social games. There are some indie games doing similar stuff. We have a lot of traditional two-dimensional artists. The game takes place inside the minds of 11 giants who are imagining the world.

"As you go from place to place, the style is different and the world changes. Your imagination brings the different parts of the world to life."

Take a look. Says spring 2011 at the end.