visualizations

Visual search is one of my favorite spaces to watch (literally), mostly because people are trying to do new things with it all the time. While big players such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo continue to tweak their engines for user's eyes and clicks, there are some little guys putting together tools that are both easier and a little more fun to use. oSkope is one of those tools. It lets you search for Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and stuff for sale on Amazon and eBay on a giant grid of thumbnails. You can click on each one to … Read more

Twitter's just launched a new portion of their service called Explore. It's essentially a "labs" section, and home to a handful of old (and new) tools to integrate and browse Twitter. The newest addition, called "Blocks," is a 3-D visualization of your friends and followers, and what amounts to a 3-D social graph of Twitter buddies. The tool loads up with a neat popping effect that looks like little rooftops, and similar to the neat startup video on the Apple TV. Each one is actually a message. Mousing over it will show you who … Read more

I guess it's physically impossible for you to get Dance Dance Revolution for your iPod, but this might be as close as you can get. It's Musika, a pseudo-psychedelic new game from PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura of the Japanese gaming company NanaOn-Sha, and it's just been released for 5th-generation iPods in conjunction with Sony BMG Music Entertainment. You can buy it in the iTunes Store's game section.

It's a "visualization game," so you can either watch the pretty patterns that synchronize with your iPod's current tunes, or you can use … Read more

Nero has been hooking multimedia hounds for years with its powerful suite of audio and video tools. With a skinnable, intuitive interface, easily accessible user manuals, and a full-featured menu, Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced is big, but doesn't disappoint. Take a peep at Nero's latest audio/video toolkit in the First Look video below.

A new alternative search engine that caught my eye this morning is SearchCrystal, a very experimental-looking tool that combines multiple search engines in a rich visual design. Each search engine gets its own color code, and results that show up in a large circle. When an item is listed on more than one search engine, it's given its own geometric shape showing which engines picked it up, along with lines that link up identical results. The goal is to give you a visualized results page that lets you compare a few engines at a time without having to scroll down one large list.

The results are split up into five different areas--one for each search engine. These engines vary by what you're searching for, be it photos, videos, news, or blog postings. In the case of blogs, SearchCrystal will pull results from Sphere, Bloglines, Google Blog search, Technorati, and BlogPulse. There's also a mode to just view Wikipedia articles. Each string shows the top 10 results in order, with the ones closer to the middle of the sphere being more important. The end result makes it look similar to a dartboard.

The one real hurdle with SearchCrystal is that it's slow. Most searches took about ten seconds a pop, with the longest taking just over 20 seconds. This is just simply too long for a casual search. Likewise, it has a learning curve--you're probably going to stare at the swarm of results the first time you try it out before knowing what you're supposed to do. While not difficult to pick up, I can see someone like my mom not knowing where to start.

As usual, there's a Facebook app for SearchCrystal. You can also e-mail it, or embed it in a blog or site with the query of your choice, which I've done after the break.

Related: Five weird ways to see search: Quintura, Clusty, and more

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Microsoft loves developers, just ask CEO Steve Ballmer. But while the company has been making some of its tools available for free, it also likes to draw the line on just how much gets given away.

According to a report in The Register, the software company has taken an aversion to TestDriven.Net, an add-on to its Visual Studio developer tools. In particular, Microsoft doesn't like the fact that the software works with Visual Studio Express, the free version of the tools. E-mail exchanges between Microsoft and the small, U.K.-based software maker have gotten increasingly testy, having … Read more

Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.

Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to … Read more

The Webware 100 is going strong, and if you're still in the voting mood, Digg has unveiled their list of 10 finalists for their API visualization contest, which can be voted on by--you guessed it--digging. Like Digg Expose, which I wrote about earlier this week (and is coincidentally a nominee), each of the finalists has found some really neat ways to play with Digg user data.

One of the most interesting aspects of this contest is the use of Adobe Apollo. Four of the 10 finalists' offerings are served up as Apollo apps, which is fairly impressive considering how … Read more

I'm a sucker for data visualizations. I waxed poetic about Swivel, the site that's attempting to make data charts accessible and useful, and the things that are coming out of Digg's labs from Stamen Design continue to innovate and change the way users can interact with social sites.

This afternoon I've been glued to "Diggspose" , a mashup made in Adobe Flash that combines Snap.com's preview shots of Web pages with popular and upcoming stories on Digg.com. The result is a moving picture show of story thumbnails you can click on and … Read more