garyc.mooo.com:3232/sketch/
I saw this on Digg (digg.com/playable_web_games/Dr ...) and was like, "sounds like a rip off of Philipp's SketchSwap", and it is.

>> This is based on (or a complete rip-off of) sketchswap.com, but with the following differences ... <<

Pretty cool actually. Philipp you know about this right?

I would say its based upon rather than a rip-off. I prefer this since you get to see real stuff.

Yeah, like genitals drawn with a mouse.

I saw this on Digg and Reddit today, too. It was a nice surprise that he mentioned SketchSwap.com, I think that's cool.

Also in 2006, someone made a Japanese SketchSwap like site. He emailed the pointer to us but we thought it was nice. rakugake.ninja-x.jp

I can imagine that it's "fairly" easy to replicate Sketch Swap nowadays, due to ActionScript 3's Drawing API. In no way am I saying that I could do it, though.

Besides the technology we also approved over 25,000 sketches by now :)

25,000! wow, that's good.

what's your criteria on approving sketches? do you just choose really good ones, or just any that don't include profanity?

Mambo, we tried to strike a balance to bring certain quality to the site. We were kinda bumping from one end to the other, in some phases people complained "I drew a terrific sketch and got back just a smiley!" and then sometimes people complained "Everybody here seems to be a greater artist than me, which is depressing to me!" Now we hope to have a good mix, a varied set. (For instance, we let a couple of "random noise cross hatch" sketches through because many people sketched this – we just don't let those through everytime because then it would become repetitive and boring.) But as rule of thumb it's not about artistic quality but whether or not we believe someone tried, and put their heart in it or had a funny idea or something, so that everyone has a chance of getting their sketch through. We still have many pics to approve though which are being stored right now, perhaps some day we need to hire Mechanical Turk :)

A Mechanical Turk! lol. But yeah, that sounds fair.

Or, perhaps one day, using Google's image recognition technology, you'll be able to automatically filter out which ones include "indecent" things.... but also, make it so the better the sketch the person creates, the better the swap!

Although, I guess art will always need a human touch...

You could already try swap sketches for sketches that took similar amount of time/have similar number of elements (lines). Maybe no in 100% of cases, but as a general rule.