I don't understand why they don't just charge accounts with more than X followers. High profile brands are (currently) getting a massive amount of free advertising. I'm sure they would be willing to pay to keep up their profile.
See Mailchimp, free up to 2k subscribers, paid after that. It's so simple.
It looks like he's using a matrix to create cartesian coordinates in a model-view space and then performing some basic linear algebra on the points to animate it. For a primer on 3D worlds check out http://learningwebgl.com/blog/?page_id=1217 where they go over it using WebGL.
I had no clue they were profitable. With "over $3 billion in revenues" and "total company expenditures ... were less than $800 million" that is quite the ROI.
After installing Picasa you can right click an image and choose "Upload to Web Albums..." where it will automatically upload the image in the background to an album called "Drop Box" which is the "Default album for newly uploaded photos.". Picasa will then automatically open your browser to said image.