VoiceThread is a photo sharing tool that launched earlier this month. It lets users upload photos from their hard drive or Flickr, and add voice and text annotations to each slide. These 'VoiceBooks' can be embedded in blogs, Web sites, or MySpace profiles. Other users can comment on each slide, with up to 28 comments per picture. The service is selling itself as a voice forum tool.
The VoiceBook creation process is handled entirely within one window, without the need to refresh or hop pages. It's pretty user-friendly, and adding photos is incredibly easy. In just a few minutes, I had managed to put together a small slide show of photos, using the 'import from Flickr' feature.
One really neat feature is the painting tool, which lets you do on-screen writing (like football commentators on TV) to match your voice narration. This is especially helpful if you want to highlight a detail or two on a complex photo. You can also pick the brush color, although to nitpick, you can't select it until you've started your voice recording. Users can also circle and doodle on your image with their personal narration.
Also neat is the photo navigation, which feels a little bit like OS X's Expose. Clicking the thumbnail button will zoom out and show you all the photos in the set. Clicking on any of them will zoom in again. Once you're viewing a photo, you can simply click it to zoom in. It's very intuitive.
ChinSwing (previous coverage) experimented with the idea of audio message boards. For all intents and purposes, quality comments to a photo can really enhance the viewing experience. On the other hand, you're likely to hear something you don't like, or come across some heavy mic breathers while browsing other people's work.
I've embedded a VoiceBook I made below.
Don't be afraid of the creepy, mucus-like mascot. ChinSwing is a voice message board that pulls double duty as a flash audio player and voice-recorder. It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately using the service requires a 4MB plug-in for both IE and Firefox.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
ChinSwing has a ton of categories for discussion, and tiny numbers (indicating topics) to help you see if there's any content within each category. There's also a just-uploaded section on the main page.
Voice messages are ordered chronologically, like a message board would be. Each discussion is separated into user submissions, and you can click on any one to play it, or you can just play the whole "discussion" from the start. The audio on several of the posts is far from studio quality, but considering most users are using their built-in laptop mics, it's still listenable.
The value of this app for the average user is questionable. Between standard message boards and YouTube, it's hard to imagine ChinSwing gaining ground as a community hot spot. It's nice that there's no registration needed to listen to the posts, but you do have download a separate app to get it going, which we think that will kill it. The technology is a neat idea, and it would be a good feature for existing message boards, but we can't see ChinSwing.com taking off on its own. In the meantime, consider it an interesting study in what the soldiers of a flame war actually sound like.
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