With the unbelieveable development help of Karsten Januszewski, we released the first Alpha version of our application, Flotzam.
Watch the flotsam and jetsam of data that you care about in this mash-up of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and blogs. Using this simple application, you can configure what you want to watch and the speed in which you see it. Want to view what your Twitter friends are doing? Want to see the photos your friends have posted on Flickr? Or maybe their photos on Facebook, too? Download now and have all of your photos, Tweets, and feeds come to you!
Essentially, we’ve built a fancy WPF-driven content-aggregator using Microsoft Expression Blend.
This project stemmed out of the "Twitterpated" project Karsten started after attending the SXSW conference this year. Essentially, we wanted to provide a way for conference members to be able to interact with each other in new ways, specifically harnessing the social-networking sites Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr.
Karsten and I worked together on the first iteration, which we called "Flitter" and displayed on the mega-screens at the MIX07 conference, before and after the keynote speeches on the first and second days.
It was also installed as a screensaver on the approximately 200 machines available in the hallways for attendee use.
The design for the Flitter application stemmed from the general aesthetic used for the MIX07 conference. We used the shapes to act as little "floating gems" that would fade in, display the users avatar image, and then expand to randomly show content from Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr. We had the application look to a special group created on Twitter for the event; it also pointed to a special group on Facebook associated with the conference. Additionally, we asked attendees to tag their Flickr photos with MIX07, which we then pulled into the application and displayed.
We took a bit of a risk, as the app would pull any content that fell within our criteria, meaning if someone took an (ahem! cough.) inappropriate photo, or Twitterd something offensive, we’d just have to live with it. Fortunately, people used the system as we had hoped and kept comments clean.
We did see interesting and *immediate* feedback on parts of the keynote, which was great. Sitting in their seats while watching the presentations and using their cellphones and PDAs, people Twittered their opinions on the presentations, the Q&A, and definitely let their opinions known.
After the conference we decided to do a new version of the application, using some things we learned in the first version, we added RSS capability, and improved the UI for customizability. The whole app just looks and works better, too.
I’ll be posting more info on how the thing was actually *built* using Microsoft Expression Blend in the coming weeks, if not days.
Please download and enjoy. Let me know if you have any problems.
Please note that this application is in alpha and we expect a couple of bugs. If you encounter any problems, please contact me or Karsten.