As a web application designer I'm always looking for new ways to visualize information and content. Musicovery has showed us a different way of visualizing and browsing music. While the menu is a standard set of music categories, the browse interface itself is like a map with your genre of music displayed in a map-like drag enabled environment. You can drag the music map around your genre until you find an interesting artist. Then when you click on their name the artist is repositioned to the center of the map and the music start playing, along with some nice visual effects.
Since flickr released it's API we have seen many wonderful mashups, however, Tagnatica is now one of my favorites. The user interface is very intuitive and easy to use. Simply type in a flickr tag on the initial screen and you're presented with a circle made of of categories in that tag. As you hover over the images you can click on them and drill down through different categories or launch into a new one. Very fun.
As a designer I experiment with colors and layout on a daily basis. While it's not a new application, the latest version of Color Tool is a must see for website designers. Most web designers have seen CSS style switchers, Cool Tool takes website color mixing to a new level by using AJAX. Cool Tool allows you to change multiple background and text colors asynchronously through an AJAX pop-out located on the left side of the browser. I can see many applications for this technique. Wonderful tool.
There are many applications that use the Flickr API to enrich our web experience, Bubblr is now at the top of my list. Bubblr allows you to search by tag or person and then to have some fun with the images. In their first screen you can search flickr images and then add thought and conversation bubble to them. Then you can publish them and send them to a friend. It feel like making a comic strip out of any flickr image. Additionally, there are two fun games to play. Memry and Phrasr are both worth checking out. Have fun!
I've experimented with most of the AJAX frameworks that have come out over the last year and ZK lives up to it's marketing line of, "Simple and Rich". ZK comes loaded with over 60 XUL and 80 XHTML components are supported, including list boxes, tree, drag-and-drop, auto-completion, sliders, timer, combo boxes, audio and many others. I found the user experience of ZK to be very fluid and can see it being a great resource for designers that do not have high-level programming skill, but still want to experiment with AJAX UI elements.
I recently found an entirely new way to interact with a website. Last week one of our clients at Ideacodes launched a virtual showroom in Second Life. When you visit Stylehive's virtual showroom you can see objects that users of the Stylehive website have bookmarked at the website. These objects such as furniture have been rendered in a 3-D format which you can interact with in the virtual space. You can even sit on a sofa or chair and then click on it which will launch your browser, and take you to the users bookmark page of that particular object. Very interactive and very fun.
I have to say mobber is fun. The point of the app is to show you who is on any particular web page at any given time and, also, to allow you to chat with anyone on that page. The installation is easy and as they claim, "it will take under 5 seconds" editors note - (edge cases only). 
The UI is clean and easy to navigate. As with any new javascript add-on to your site, I would recommend monitoring performance over time but, I would recommend adding mobber to one of your pages. It's a blast to see and chat with some of your formerly anonymous users.
In most cases the news is presented in a rather boring but usable way. Newsmap show us a new way to look at world trends in news reporting through their Google News mashup. As they say on their website, "It's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media." One other aspect of Newsmap that was a great user experience was the instant language translation. Newsmap will be one of my daily reads from now on.
In my opinion Feed Rinse is one of the best designed products I've seen in a while. Their name matches the function of the application, the branding works well with the core message and the overall user interface is intuitive and stylish. The real gem is the user interaction and experience. The process of importing and rinsing your rss feed is fast and easy to use. The free version is limited to 3 feeds, however, it seems to have full functionality, except for profanity filtering. A very well designed application!
Max Kiesler is an award-winning strategic designer and co-founder
and principal of Ideacodes.com, a web consultancy in San Francisco focused on next generation websites. About Max...
