Twistori – Streaming Thoughts From Twitter
29/04/2008
Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs have created a great twitter mash-up called Twistori. As they state in the footer of the website it was inspired by the Jonathan Harris app We Feel Fine. The app draws it’s data from another twitter mash-up Summize. I have a positive bias towards Twistori as I love streaming data. I feel it’s very engaging and immersive to view data this way – I spent way too much time on Twittervision, Digg Spy and The Artist Network Visualization when they first came out. From an interaction standpoint the only two features I would like to see is a pause button and the ability to click on the tweet and go to twitter. All in all a fun and engaging website.
Searchme is new search visualization which lets you see the webpage before you surf there. The idea is pretty neat. As you start to enter a search term you are shown a list of categories that are associated with that term. You can either choose a category, or search all categories. The results are shown in “coverflow” paradigm. You can still sort by category, or just click though the “coverflow” of all of the pages. I love the idea and the execution, however, from a user interface perspective there are a few interactions that would help the UI a great deal. For example, a full screen mode would make seeing the webpages much more useful. Even with a 30 inch Apple HD monitor the pages are a little hard to read. If searchme added a high-rez full screen mode or a way to magnify the page images it would give me a way to see the page relevance to my search. One step beyond that would be to show the highlighted search term(s) on each page as it flew by. Props out to the developers/designers! In my opinion it just needs a little UX love and then we could have a real winner.