A few weeks back saw the launch of twittervision. Twittervision presents you a map of the world Google style then everyone that has “geo-located” themselves on the service pops up on the map when they post a new tweet. With their avatar and their message. Nice idea and a total time waster. The sort of thing that you can’t help but watch and then after 10 minutes go what the heck I have been here for 10 minutes!

I have a severe disappointment for you. David Troy who developed twittervision has launched flickrvision today, more time of zero productivity for all you voyeurs out there. But I must admit it is fascinating to watch.

This time round there is not much you have to do to get noticed by the service which I assume is based on the Flickr API. Just geotag your photo’s in Flickr and they are picked up. Geotagged photos pop up from around the world with their location identified in the same manner as twittervision.

Something struck me looking at this map of the world and seeing the occasional picture from Australia pop up. What it was is the fact that here is a photo service that on the web seems like your own personal service. But then add in flickrvision and you realize that it is a service that unites people. People with a common purpose, to post pictures.

But what you are watching is people’s lives unfold. I saw pictures of weddings, holidays, children, bands, flowers, animals, art, expressionism, religion, water and everything else you could think of. I thought of the attachment that the author of the photo has to their content and the fact that they are all contributing to the content and enjoyment on a global scale above and beyond their ownership of the image. Plus the fact that they might be totally unaware that their image is being viewed by me. This gave me a real kick and I really enjoyed it.

You don’t get that “global” feel when you upload a picture to Flickr. Nor do you get it trawling through the search results from a searched tag.

Check it out, I think it is a great time waster and makes you appreciate that we are all on the globe together and contributing content. That might be a photo, a blog post, comment, bookmark, video… anything. I guess that is the power of an image over some text from a tweet. There is something in an image that feels like you are looking through a window.

Dave

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 11:27 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.