TouchGraph Facebook Browser

Continuing the theme of interesting interfaces, check out the below screencap from TouchGraph Photos, a Java-based Facebook app which maps your friends and their relationships using coloured bubbles (and photos when your more zoomed in). It's similar to the popular Friend Wheel app (175,000 adds and counting) but with a slicker interface and a focus on navigating your friends' photos. They've employed the same interface in tools for exploring both Google and Amazon.

TUN3R: old skool radio discovery

Kooky interface of the week award goes to radio discovery site TUN3R which presents visitors with a giant radio 'dial' populated with thumbnail images of assorted online radio stations. Drag the 'needle' over a thumbnail and you hear a recent sample of the station's output. Beneath the dial you get details of the streaming format and location, a screengrab of the station's homepage and a sample of the recent playlist (if available).

Randomly clicking around the mosaic proves entertaining for a minute or two, although it's the search functionality which is more likely to generate a genuine musical match; typing in the name of an artist highlights every station on the dial which has recently played one of their tracks. Nice. You can also filter by genre or language or search the contents of the station's homepage. Most of the featured stations are promoted for free, although there also an option to buy space in a million dollar homepage stylee.

Whilst I suspect I may not be revisiting TUN3R on a regular basis, it's a interesting attempt to recreate the physicality of analogue radio's dial-twiddling experience (you even get a touch of static when you're roving around the dial) and much more compelling than a list of the stations could ever be.

Top 10 best Facebook applications

You've got to hand it to Facebook. The rollout of Facebook Platform was a masterstroke, not only getting them kudos with developers but also making their site sticky as hell, with a seemingly constant supply of new applications to tempt you away from your work. Whilst many of the apps won't stay installed on your profile for long, there are a few diamonds in the rough. Below is a round-up of ten of the best.

BandTracker - automatically pulls in the artists from the Favourite Music section of your profile and alerts you when they're playing your city. Also creates decent aggregation pages around each band, pulling in videos from YouTube and lists from Last.fm.

Eating - A neat little app from restaurant review site menuism, enabling you to share your dining experiences and discover new eateries. Slightly let down by a North American bias (no, I don't want to travel to London, Ontario for my evening meal...)

Flixster - nice integration of the movie site of the same name (reviewed here) which pulls in your existing ratings (something iLike would do well to get sorted), shows what your friends have been watching and provides access to the fiendishly addictive Never-Ending Movie Quiz.

Friend Stats - creates a page of lists and charts visualising aggregate data on your facebook chums. So, now I know that the majority of my friends are liberal graduates who like music and drinking, watching Lost, listening to Muse and reading John Steinbeck...

Interview - like The Guardian Weekend magazine Q&A feature (only with a slightly smaller readership), Interview asks you a stream of user-submitted questions which you can then add to your profile, letting everyone know how witty and erudite you are.

iRead - expose your bookshelf to your friends, detailing what you've read, what you're reading now and what's next on your list. You can find books by author, title or ISBN or import your Amazon wishlist. Once added, you can rate, review or recommend each title and find others who have read it.

myTV - share your favourite YouTube videos with your friends without leaving the comfort of Facebook. A slick interface and the option to import your favourites from YouTube are the icing on the cake.

TV Shows - release your inner Nick Horby and rank your favourite TV shows. There's 15,760 titles in the database, delivering fairly decent recommendations based on your list. The app also includes TV news and listings for the US, the UK, Canada and Australia.

Where I've Been - colour code a map of the world according to where you've lived, visited and want to visit. Turns out I'm not that well travelled after all...

wis.dm - encourages users to ask and answer yes/no questions on any conceivable topic. Strangely addictive although liable to quickly give away your moral and political leanings.

My digital life in numbers

I seem to have hit a bunch of digital milestones recently. Here's a summary:

• 100 blog posts (viewed by 20,000 unique users)
• 350 eBay deals
• 800 del.icio.us bookmarks
• 1,500 Flickr photos (viewed 35,000 times)
• 12,000 Last.fm tracks

(mental note: get out more).

10 things I'd be blogging about if I wasn't so busy

Work is eating my soul at the moment. Here are ten things I'd be blogging about at greater length if I wasn't so damn busy:

The BBC Radio Player - which is 5 years old today. My first major project at the BBC, the Radio Player now generates 23 million hours of live and on-demand listening to BBC Radio every month. Not too shabby.

i'm in like with you - strangely addictive Web 2.0 style flirting game where you collect points which you can then use to bid for attention. Invite-only beta at the mo (thanks Jo for mine) - mail me if you want one (dan at fabricoffolly.co.uk).

Spock - a search engine for finding people. Also in invite-only beta (I've got a couple left if you want to mail me, as above).

Jindabyrne - outstanding Aussie flick based on the Raymond Carver short story 'So Much Water So Close to Home', starring Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne. Guaranteed a spot in my Top 30 films of 2007 (here's the 2006 list).

Video annotation (a.k.a. deep tagging) - an interesting new growth area in online video (see Mojiti, veotag, Viddler.com), although Click.TV was recently taken offline. The BBC is currently experimenting with audio annotation.

ubroadcast - in our on-demand, podcastable world, live broadcasting is a USP for this DIY streaming service. Not wildly different from Live365 and Shoutcast mind.

Babelgum - finally got access to this Joost-alike. You should now be able to get in without an invite but mail me if you want one.

Spotback - del.icio.us with ratings.

Heatmaps - ClickTale and tapefailure have joined Crazy Egg at the forefront of new ways of recording and visualising visitors' browsing activity on your site.

T-shirts 2.0 - liberate yourself from the tyranny of the Threadless voting community and get your crap design made into a real-life tee which you can then try and flog to your mates at one of the new breed of democratic t-shirt retailers (Bountee, CafePress, DNA STYLELAB, GoodStorm, innerTee, Spreadshirt, Zazzle).

Right, back to work...

Mogopop

Creating browseable text-based content for iPods has historically been a manual and rather tedious affair, as I discovered when creating a prototype Glastonbury festival guide at work last year (which spawned the portable version of BBC Electric Proms website). Whilst a number of simple text converters are available (e.g. Text2iPod X, iPod Notes Packager), more sophisicated content has tended to require a fair amount of fiddling around with HTML tags. Until now.



Launched in early January, Mogopop aims to provide an end-to-end solution for creating, downloading and transferring packages of text and other media (audio, video and pictures) to your iPod. In order to sync content you need to install the Mogopop Manager (a free download for PC or Mac). It's then simply a case of choosing a content package from one of the dozen available channels (Events, Guides, Music, Videos+, Games, People, Books, Education, Travel, Food & Drink, Sports, Pix) and plugging in your iPod. Once synced the content appears under Extras > Notes.



Content creation requires (free) registration and is done via a drag-and-drop web interface above, which enables you to easily link pages and media assets which it then bundles up into a package ready for download. You get 50MB of free online storage to upload audio, video and pictures to your 'media suitcase' (accepted file formats are .mp3 and .m4a for audio,.m4v for video and .jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .pdf, and .png for pictures). To test it out, I created a content package pulling together recent posts from this blog (linked to from the badge at the foot of this post) which proved to be a surprisingly straightforward process.



Raising awareness of the service is likely to be a key challenge for Mogopop and the ability to 'iPod Your MySpace Page' with an embeddable widget to promote it could help nudge the service closer to the mainstream. The content offer isn't particularly strong as yet (the most downloaded packages include The Wine Spectator's Top 100 Wines of 2006 and a port of the Wikipedia entry on World of Warcraft) although it's still relatively early days for the site.

The bigger question is how long before the iPod follows the iPhone in offering integrated Wi-Fi access which could mean game over for any businesses relying on sideloading to mobile devices.

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Why Seven Ages of Rock rocks

It's rare for me to post on something work-related but I feel compelled to point you in the direction of the awesome Seven Ages of Rock site which launched this week in support of a new landmark music documentary series starting this Saturday on BBC TWO. What's particularly rocking my world about the site is the way in which it augments quality BBC video and editorial with feeds from some of the best-in-class Web 2.0 services. So, in addition to the exclusive mini-docs (with embeddable promo clips - yay!), photos, album reviews and related links for each featured artist, you get a biography from Wikipedia, photos from Flickr and a chart of the most listened to tracks from Last.fm. The content can be navigated by programme, artist, event or via an interactive timeline which maps key milestones from the seven eras. Users are also invited to have their say on any of the programmes or events. The design and build of the site were carried out by London-based agency Airlock whilst the brilliant Matt Walton produced the whole thing from the BBC side. Cracking job guys. Now over to Dave Grohl talking about learning to play the pillows...

Sputtr.

If your current browser homepage is set to Google but you have a penchant for Web 2.0 sites then you might like to check out the improbably named Sputtr. It enables you to search 36 different web services by typing into the search box and clicking the appropriate icon. All of the Web 2.0 poster children are there (del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati et al.) and it's all wrapped up in cuddly Wii-esque interface. I like it.

Spool.fm

Am liking the look of new online music player, Spool.fm. Whilst the AJAX interface is still a little rough around the edges, the drag-and-drop playlist builder and listen with a friend feature are pretty killer. It's especially welcome now Pandora has announced its intention to start blocking users from outside the US.

fabric of folly widgetized

Thanks to yourminis fabric of folly is now a widget (embedded below) which can easily be added to your desktop, startpage, blog or social networking page. Nice.

Looks like 2007 is indeed turning out to be the year of the widget.

Round-up of Internet TV services

So if Motorola's research is on the money and 43% of UK broadband users have watched TV on the internet, where are they getting it from? Until recently there weren't a huge number of legal options available, with BitTorrent and YouTube/Google Video offering the best chance of tracking down that nugget of TV gold. However, progress with rights frameworks and a growing acceptance of P2P distribution mean that the UK's major broadcasters are slowly starting to join the party. 4oD and Sky by Broadband are already up and running with ITV.com and the BBC iPlayer both expected soon. However, it's not just established broadcasters who spy an opportunity in this area. A new breed of aggregators is springing up with a range of technologies and business models, all hoping for a slice of the Internet TV pie. Below is a round-up of eight of the most promising.

Zattoo

Zattoo provides access to (almost) live TV via your PC (or Mac), using a proprietary P2P streaming technology and the H.264 codec. Debuted in Switzerland during the 2006 World Cup, Zattoo is now available in Denmark and the UK with a gradual roll out planned to other territories. The UK offer (currently in private beta) provides access to seven of the BBC's eight digital TV channels (not BBC Parliament) and Al Jazeera English with an impressively short time-lag (approx. 6 seconds). The interface is super simple, comprising a channel chooser and, er, that's it.



Pros: High-quality, full screen rendering of live TV with short time-lag.
Cons: No on-demand content. Offer limited by territory.

Content offer:
Navigation:
Features:
Overall:

Joost

The poster-child for the new breed of P2P TV services, Joost has received the lion's share of press attention thanks largely to the pedigree of it's illustrious founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa). An immersive, full-screen experience, Joost is currently busy signing up content partners (Warner Bros., Viacom, Sony, CBS & CNN have all inked deals) and widening it's beta test in preparation for a summer launch (not without a few teething problems it has to be said). A more detailed assessment of Joost can be found here.



Pros: Innovative and intuitive interface (not an easy combination). Web-enabled widgets.
Cons: Technical teething problems. Content offer not yet compelling enough.

Content offer:
Navigation:
Features:
Overall:

Babelgum

Currently in closed beta, P2P streaming service Babelgum has a lot in common with Joost and has been fighting to get out of the shadow of its media-friendly cousin. Unfortunately I can't help with the cause because I haven't yet received a beta test invite :-( Anyone existing beta testers care to throw me a bone/invite...?

Vuze

Vuze (ne. Zudeo) is a content service built on the back of the hugely popular Java BitTorrent client Azureus (downloaded more than 140 million times according to their blurb). The relationship between the two feels a bit awkward at times with one providing geo-restricted access to a selection of mostly paid-for content, the other providing free global access to the millions of files distributed via BitTorrent. BBC Worldwide is currently the jewel in the content crown with whole episodes of Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen and classic Doctor Who available 'to rent' for $0.99 (assuming you live in the US).



Pros: High-quality video (much of it HD). Comments/ratings.
Cons: Content offer limited by region. Mostly paid-for.

Content offer:
Navigation:
Features:
Overall:

Jalipo

Jalipo describes itself as "the first online marketplace for TV and video" and is boldly backing that claim with the creation of a new online currency, J:Credits (when will they learn?). The streamed-only proposition has five genre categories (News, Sport, Movies, Entertainment & Other) which can be filtered by On-Demand, Live Events and TV Stations. The current content offer is fairly news-heavy with partners including Al Jazeera, BBC World, Bloomberg and France 24. The $64,000 question is whether enough people will be willing to stump up the cash (£1 buys you 196 credits at the current exchange rate, enough for an hour and a half of Al Jazeera at the highest bit-rate). Embedding is apparently on the way although it's hard to see how they'll get this to work effectively what with the need for sign-in/payment.



Pros: Choice of bit-rates. Don't need to download any software.
Cons: Limited content offer. It costs.

Content offer:
Navigation:
Features:
Overall:

Veoh

The Veoh offering encompasses both a web-based Flash player and a P2P desktop app for viewing downloaded content. It also spans both professionally produced and user-generated content resulting in an extremely eclectic content offer. At the time of writing the most popular videos were episodes of Japanese anime series Naruto: Shippūden and Bleach, an illegally uploaded episode of House and a clip of professional attention-seeker Paris Hilton naked. Fortunately, there are a wealth of navigation options to help you find your way through the morass of content including Most Popular, Recently Added, Top Rated, Most Discussed, Top Favourite and Run Length (perfect if you have exactly 2 mins 43 seconds to fill). You can also browse by Channels, Series and People, with options to filter by Most Subscribed, Recently Updated and Top Rated. The most subscribed channels (excluding Veoh's own promos channels) are currently MusiqTone and Prom Queen, although the subscribers numbers are low by YouTube standards.



Pros: Lots of content. High-quality video. Wide range of navigation options.
Cons: Shortage of big-hitter content partners

Content offer:
Navigation:
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Overall:

Brightcove

Founded in 2004, Brightcove is a relative old-timer amongst the Internet TV crowd, although it wasn't until October of last year that it branched out from it's established syndication model to launch Brightcove.com as a consumer destination, aggregating video from its network of publishers. The content offer is mostly short-form (streamed using Flash) with music videos and celebrity clips dominating the 'The Top 10 Buzz'. The primary navigation device is genre, with channels acting as a second-tier filter. Sky One has a channel under TV Faves, although only the Lost recaps appear to be attracting much traffic. On the plus side, the video quality is pretty good and there's one-click integration with a few of the most popular Web 2.0 sites (Digg, Facebook and del.icio.us). As you'd expect from a company which has built its business on syndication, the link/embed/send to a friend options are all present and correct. The recommended Related Videos also seem to be almost always on the money (unlike YouTube).



Pros: Embed functionality and integration with Web 2.0 sites.
Cons: Dearth of compelling longer-form content. Limited navigation options.

Content offer:
Navigation:
Features:
Overall:

Democracy

Democracy (soon be renamed Miro) is an desktop application developed by the Participatory Culture Foundation which enables you to subscribe to over 1,000 free video channels (delivered via RSS) and view them via an integrated version of the awesome VLC media player. It's also possible to search and download from some of the main streaming video sites (e.g. YouTube, Google Video, Revver, blip.tv) without leaving the comfort of the application and they've even thrown in a fully-featured BitTorrent client for good measure. As a consequence the content offer is potentially limitless, although the most popular channels include Adult Swim, Comedy Central, NBC Nightly News and Movies in the Public Domain. The interface will be familiar to iTunes users with the added bonus of a warm and fuzzy feeling resulting from the open-source, DRM-free nature of the enterprise.



Pros: Excellent one-stop shop interface. Potentially unlimited content offer.
Cons: Most mainstream broadcasters too scared to put out DRM-free content.

Content offer:
Navigation:
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Conclusion

A quick scan of the above star-ratings reveals the key challenge for these new players: compelling content. There's no shortage of impressively implemented technology on display here but very little in the way of must-see content. Democracy and Veoh come closest by throwing their doors open to all creators of video and allowing the cream to rise to the top, although the absence of high-profile commercial content will be a stumbling block for some. The bigger question is whether these newbies can get their act together before Apple starts ramping up its television download offering in support of the launch of Apple TV in the UK. It's going to be an interesting next 12 months for Internet TV.