Webware

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm a sucker for pretty-looking things. It helps when they're actually useful, too. In the case of most items in Digg's labs section, the latter can't often be said, but they're certainly fun to look at. Today Digg launched a new visualization called "pics," which is a new way to see what pictures people are digging in real time. The new feature coincides with the enhancement of a pictures section, and recategorization, which took place earlier this month.

Each category on Digg gets its own section, and photos from each story show up every time they're dugg. You can see right away which stories are hot, just like you could with any other Digg visualization, but in the case of pics, you can actually look at the picture without even having to open up the story. The page also has keyboard shortcuts set up to let you traverse the landscape of stories with your arrow keys.

Like all other Digg labs projects, the visualization was made by the Web 2.0 heartthrob studio Stamen Design, which built out Trulia's real estate visualizations, Twitter Explore, and the (now-defunct) Oakland crime maps.

Digg's got a new visualization tool for its image section.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you're into panoramic photos there's a cool place just for you. It's called viewAt, and it's a really slick panoramic photo service where you can browse through other people's panoramic photos, and upload your own. If you've ever checked out panoramic shots on other photo services, you'll know they're hard to enjoy unless you have a large, widescreen monitor. Even then, you're missing out on the experience of actually looking around like you would in real life. viewAt attempts to solve this problem with its specially designed Flash viewer that lets you pan around and enjoy big, panoramic shots in their full glory.

The service employs the Flash Panorama Player, which manages to serve up a similar experience to the Quicktime VR functionality of yore, but uses the same plug-in you've got installed to watch YouTube videos. Each of the shots on viewAT is geotagged as well, letting you sort and browse through shots by country. There's also a mini map that opens up below each shot to let you see if there are others nearby. Other users can comment on the shot, as well as read up on the equipment and technique that was used to capture it.

If you're looking to upload your own panoramics to the service, there is some heavy lifting involved. viewAt has provided a brief how-to here, although be warned--it involves a stitching program, and some photography skills.

Enjoy other people's panoramic works at viewAt. If you've got one of your own, you can upload it too.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

A subtle wake-up call to North American Internet subscribers is now coming from the South Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong-based versions of Google, and their iGoogle start pages. These broadband-rich markets are seeing a more complex version of Google's historically simple start page, with some flashy animations, and a color-coded system of dots to represent various Google services. Is this a sneak peak at the next generation of Google's GUI? Potentially.

We've seen some other flashy interfaces for Google over the years, with some of the more ambitious efforts remaining hidden in its experimental section. The latest public change has been Universal Search, which the company unveiled in mid-May. While this has improved the variety of results you get from searches, it's not nearly on the eye-candy level of the stuff that's coming out of the East.

Here's a video of the new UI, which features the quick-to-load colored dots, which trigger the animation when you mouse over them. Slick.

[via DownloadSquad via PC World]

Disney.com unveiled its new look this morning. Announced last month at CES by CEO Bob Iger, the new Disney.com aims to bring more personalization to the site and cash in on provide Disney content to share with others. Funny thing is, you can't even share the content on outside sites like MySpace or blogs.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's downright tough to find the new personalized area of Disney.com, but it's called XD. The Flash-based XD interface takes about half a minute to load, and you're greeted to a smattering of widgets featuring Disney content that appears automatically depending on what "channel" you're on. What's strange is that all of the channels and content are kid-centric, despite the Iger's claims that the site would tailor its content by age demographic. Maybe Disney is intending on rolling that out in the future. For now, expect to find out what's happening on That's So Raven instead of juicy details on love triangles and smoke monsters on Lost.

Maybe the most disappointing aspect of the Disney revamp is how long it takes to load. While it looks kind of pretty once it's done, eye candy can only go so far. I can understand the XD features taking a while since it's loading a giant Flash player, but it took around 10 seconds to fully load the home page from a really fast connection. For dial-up users, there's a lite version of the site, but I'm a firm believer in making good first impressions with quick-loading front pages for everyone.

The lack of sharing for the XD widgets is disappointing. It's that same "walled garden" mentality that AOL is just now beginning to let go. Protecting content is one thing, but providing it online for free with such tight restrictions is bad form in the age of widgets and YouTube. Hopefully Disney will open (and speed) things up in the coming weeks.

(Credit: CNET Networks)