Web 2.0 & Social Media

Today MSNBC launched a few new components including Spectra, and immersive visual newsreader experience that merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features Spectra is one of the coolest information visualization experiences I’ve seen. Check it out!

In January Sprout launched SproutBuilder, a quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more. Include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services. At first I thought this may be some kind of “prosumer” tool, nice for marketers or brands that that aren’t big enough for real solutions.

After a thorough review I’m recommending to clients and agency colleagues to seriously consider SproutBuilder for several reasons:

• Robust design/authoring environment: Sprout provides dozens of ready built templates but its easy for more advanced Flash designers to create anything from scratch. Many of the common design tools are available and you can upload content including images, video, audio, Flash files (swf’s), and more. Adding these assets to your sprout is as easy as dragging and dropping.
• Drag and drop components: Advanced components that you can add by simply dragging and dropping. Choose from slideshows, jukeboxes, RSS feeds, and more. Or “Mashup” any of components from our web service partners including PollDaddy, Google, Ribbit, ChipIn, and others. Continue reading »

Yesterday my bretheren at Digitas France have created a very cool Twitter mashup twittearth. The project that was done “just for fun” was featured on the coveted Techcrunch blog. 

twittearth integrates Twitter.com with Paperversion’s for the 3D engine, Yahoo Local API for the geolocalisation service, tinyurl.com for the short url API and uses fasticon for those great free icons. Thanks to TarGz, _pil_, Thomas and Christophe from Digitas France SA.

There’s a lot of buzz about AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML); but what’s at the center is JavaScript. JavaScript is the world’s most popular programming language. It looks like Java but its much more flexible and works inside the browser. Here’s a few JavaScript leaders to watch.

Continue reading »

Last month Yahoo! relaunched Digg clone Yahoo! Buzz with much fanfare. Just like Digg Yahoo! Buzz lets people submit articles either by a link on the article page or directly on the site; and then the user community promotes and demotes articles (social ranking). What’s different is that Yahoo! not only factors votes but also the Yahoo! search engine logs to determine popularity. The big incentive is that top stories also get listed on the Yahoo! home page. Clearly there’s some advantage to being on the front page of Yahoo! vs. Digg. Will Yahoo! Buzz be successfull or end up like like AOL’s Digg clone Propeller?

Facebook is the second most popular social network next to MySpace. Since Facebook released it’s api its quickly evolved into a software platform and developers are building businesses around it. In just 10 weeks, hundreds of developers launched more than 2,500 new applications, triggering 139 million downloads.

Read the full Business 2.0 article “The Facebook Economy”.

OpenMass.org brings together official government data, news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what is going on in the Massachusetts Legislature.

The site mashes a few api’s including one call “Follow the Money“, a database of US campaign contributions.

From their site: Money in state politics plays a pivotal role in shaping public policy in individual states and across the nation. The nonpartisan Institute on Money in State Politics tracks contributions in all 50 states and makes this data easily searchable online…The Institute collects campaign-finance data for state-level candidates, party committees and ballot-measure committees in all 50 states. Each two-year election cycle, data-acquisition specialists compile more than 90,000 disclosure reports from more than 16,000 candidates in the states and process more than 3.2 million records of contribution information.  

GO2WEB20.net is a fun way to explore the world of Web 2.0 solutions. The site uses a Flash/AJAX application to display almost 1,200 logos. You can quickly filter the display by keyword or you can select a tag from a tag cloud. As you roll-over each logo a tooltip displays the name and description and when you click an information panel appears with more details.

The site is supported by advertising. If your service is listed there’s a panel (190 x 180 pixels) where you can pay to display an ad or rich content such as widget or video.