The fun browser add-on PicLens has incorporated YouTube and Amazon.com into the short but hopefully soon-to-grow list of supported Web sites. Compatible with Firefox on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, and Safari, PicLens recreates your surfing experience with a futuristic graphical display.
PicLens now supports searches on YouTube and Amazon.com.
(Credit: CNET Networks)As Rafe talked about in February, PicLens highlights the image content of a site and allows you to whip back and forth using mouse gestures instead of conventional static browsing. If you're familiar with how it works with an image site like Flickr, the YouTube interface is identical. The PicLens plug-in will install a grid button on your Toolbar, which you click to activate the PicLens full-screen interface. Click a thumbnail to start playing a video, while the search box lives in the upper right of your screen. As video starts playing, standard YouTube controls appear at the bottom of the video. One potential drawback is that if the quality of the video is low, then the not-quite-full-screen playback will probably appear pixelated.
On Amazon, the experience is slightly different. The main Amazon.com page doesn't support the PicLens button, but if you click on the button anyway it will open up the PicLens UI. From there, change the Web site search to Amazon, type in your search term, and images of whatever item you searched for will zoom past. The Amazon interface responded slower than other, more heavily-image based Web sites like Picasa.
PicLens currently supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Fotobucket, deviantART, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and about a half-dozen others. The slideshow mode makes PicLens more accessible for users who are worried about the vertiginous effects of the add-on. There's also a plug-in for WordPress users to add the feature to their site, and instructions for any webmaster to add PicLens support to their self-hosted pages.
Online storage provider Dropio has a cool new feature for its users today, allowing them to tap into Twitter to post updates every time they add files to one of their storage folders. Dropio's architecture is based around folders (called "drops") so after plugging in your Twitter log-in to any specific drop it will broadcast changes every time files are added or removed.
What makes this feature particularly useful is that you can assign it to specific drops but not all of them at once, meaning if you want to keep some files and uploads private you don't have to blanket that information out into the Twitter community. It also works with any file type supported by Dropio, including messages left by phone using Dropio's free voice recording tool.
Users who would prefer not to use Twitter as a broadcasting service can also subscribe to alerts via SMS. You can plug in any numbers you'd like alerts sent to (per drop) and it will send out a link every time one is added. If you feel like saving your wallet from SMS charges there's an RSS feed per drop as well.
Also new and notable is support for one of my favorite browser add-ons PicLens. If you've got the plug-in installed hitting the PicLens button in the top right corner of your drop will display all the files in a giant wall, which is a more more enjoyable way to parse through folders full of pictures, videos and audio.
To see a video of the Twitter integration in action you can go here. Below is a shot of what your Tweets will look like. It took about 30 seconds for it to process mine from upload to tweet, which isn't too shoddy.
Dropio users can now drop in their Twitter credentials and have any updates sent out to their Twitter account. This is on a per drop basis, so you can tweak certain folders to broadcast, while others don't.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
TiltViewer turns your photos into a visually engaging experience.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Got a photo gallery you want to spice up? Check out TiltViewer. Like CoolIris' PicLens, it takes your photos and places them on a dynamic 3D wall that can be zoomed around with your mouse. Clicking any thumbnail will scale it up as big as your browser window is, and you can flip any shot to view the metadata--complete with customizable links that go towards that photo's sale page, or to download links.
The big difference between the PicLens and TiltViewer is that the latter doesn't require the viewer to have any sort of browser plug-in installed to see your shots, although setting it up on your page requires installing a small bit of code and linking it up with files you have hosted elsewhere.
To demonstrate the technology, there's a test page with the entire "explore" section of Flickr set up here. The tool is completely free, although leaves a small watermark on all your shots. A slightly more configurable pro version that's watermark-free runs at $45. Airtight Interactive, the makers of TiltViewer, also make a handful of other neat, or otherwise visually engaging Flash tools. You can check out the entire gallery of them here.
[via DownloadSquad]
Update 7:59 a.m. PDT June 4: Comment from Cooliris added.
Shashi Seth, the executive leading the effort to make money from video-sharing site YouTube, has left Google, the company confirmed Thursday.
"Shashi was a valued member of both the Google and YouTube teams, and we wish him well in his new endeavors," the company said in a statement. Asked about plans for his replacement, the company said, "We have a talented team leading our monetization efforts at YouTube, and we are excited about the future."
The departure was reported Tuesday by Om Malik, who said Seth now is chief revenue officer of Cooliris. That Kleiner-Perkins-funded start-up is the developer of PicLens, a swoopy and dynamic browser tool for looking at photos.
Cooliris confirmed the move, too. "We're glad to have Seth on board at Cooliris," said Alec Jeong of the company.
YouTube monetization is job No. 1 at Google, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt has declared. Google is working on new YouTube ad options, and it recently added a YouTube buzz targeting option that lets advertisers place ads on videos that are gaining fast in popularity.
PicLens, which we've covered before, is a browser plug-in that replaces the typical photo viewer you use on sites like Flickr. It's recently been updated, and if you haven't checked it out lately, now's the time. It's stunning.
The plug-in, which works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, and Safari (where it's a bit limited), lets you create a moving wall of images where you'd otherwise just see your Web app's more static display of pictures. Launching the viewer is just a matter of clicking a new "play" icon that appears on images when you're on a PicLens-supported site.
Sort of like CoverFlow, and in a very good way.
You can fling the wall backwards and forward to see images in the list, zoom in to full-screen versions of files with a double-click, or start a slideshow. It's a very Mac-like experience.
You also get a search bar in the viewer, which can scan for tagged images on Google, Yahoo, Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugMug, and DeviantArt. The plug-in itself recognizes images from more sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Picassa Web Albums, and AOL Images.
I use it to keep my kid entertained (a slideshow of helicopters will quiet him right down). It really is a better experience than the standard search, view, and slideshow experience you usually get.
There's no embeddable version of the PicLens view yet. I'd like to see that.
CoolIris, which makes PicLens, is nicely funded by Kleiner-Perkins, and as yet has no system to make money from the service. Expect ads in the system to come once the user base has grown. Until then, you can enjoy this sweet product without commercial interruption.
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