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 manipulate. The moniker Diggspose is a nod to Mac OS X's Expose feature, which tiles thumbnails of active desktop windows--an effect that has been emulated in Diggspose with three quick cascading presets. Diggspose also pulls double duty as an extension of Diggspy, Digg's live feed of newly submitted stories. Using Diggspose, you can now watch this stream with thumbnails in real time, using a neat carousel effect.
The service is hosted by Yourminis, the single-page aggregation service. Expect several other neat and new visualizations for the popular user-generated site beginning on Thursday, when Digg unveils the top 10 finalists for its API visualization contest.
[via Digg]
Digg's stories show up as visual thumbnails. When you see one you're interested in, you can click it to go directly to the story, or hold control and click to go to its page on Digg.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
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.
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