Fun With Information
Getty Moodstream, detailed below
I check out this Infosthetics blog occasionally, about cool stuff people are doing with information displays. Also check out Uncrate products which I can’t ship to this godforsaken isle. Found a couple very, very cool things lately. The first two are new ways of looking at photos, and the other is a new way of looking at one’s Facebook network. Getty Images has a new thing called Moodstream, which is totally blowing my mind with its (quick) streaming combo of photo, video and audio. Totally awesome for a club. PicLens has this Firefox plugin which does something similar for photos on almost any page, though it works the best on Flickr or Facebook. Finally, Nexus is the coolest (re:only) Facebook plugin I’ve seen. It takes all your friends and graphs it as a literal network. I can physically see how people are connected, and how my Ohio or Montreal friends are here or there. Very cool, and only the tip of the iceberg in terms of informatics to come.
This is a new service from Getty, that depository of very expensive beautiful/corporate photos. They have a sizable video bank and now audio as well, and they’ve packed it into this killer full screen experience that loads fast even on my Sri Lankan connection. It’s eye candy, verily, but it feels like the damn future. It’s ideal for background in a nightclub or something, and you can – as per the name – customize the experience based on mood (happy, sad, lively, not). There are also a few presets on the jogdial. As user interface and depth and qual of content goes, very hot.
screenshot by Thomas Hawk
PicLens is an extension that you download for Firefox (maybe Explorer, dunno) that creates this immersive user interface around photos and, now, video. It makes a big wall of images that you can fly up and down as the pictures load, some streaming out to infinity. If you click an image it loads a bigger size and you can view it there. I find that the interface actually loads faster than the normal HTML pages, so I can fly through photostreams on Flickr or Facebook (now YouTube). It’s especially good for kids, cause I can just go to the tag page for something like elephant or tiger and browse without using the mouse at all. The UI is good enough for kids (who have no patience for the kludges and clicks of HTML). Feels like how it should be.
Facebook is, for me, a bit too much like high school. I avoid it as much as possible. The one thing that tweaked my geek is this Nexus app which takes the wealth of network data therein and makes it viewable/searchable. I can now see how people are connected, and what different cliques I’m associated with. I can also see exes in the middle of networks which aren’t as accessible as the used to be… another reason I void the Facebook. In my graph, above, you can see my high school friends, and they’re now sorta outliers to the Sri Lanka central.
So anyways, the web is getting very cool, though I suspect these are just the leeches to the penicillin that’s to come.
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