Published by Karl on 29 Mar 2008
My World Just Got a Whole Lot Smaller
Where to begin? Well, let me start at the origins of this tale…
I finally decided to sign up for a Twitter account. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/ktsakos. I signed up because I wanted to follow a few of the pundits I hear talking about it on some of my favorite podcasts. Twitter in itself is kind of amazing. It allows you to post what are basically micro blogs. Anything you post must be 140 characters or less. There are numerous applications which allow you to access it directly and also track the people whose twits you are watching. It’s a fascinating way to see what is going on around the world with the people who interest you (and who twitter).
Oddly, Twitter is not the subject of this entry. It is in fact a site called Flickrvision. Now we all have heard of Flickr (no, it’s not a typo, it’s the cool web 2.0 way of dropping the ‘e’ in site names) which is a social networking site oriented around photography. I myself have always been a person who wanted to post my images myself on my own site. This feeling is changing after finding Flickrvision.
Filckrvision combines two web sites for an amazing experience. It basically watches the recent post feed from Flickr and then looks at the location of the poster. It then uses an API (programing interface) for Google Maps to pinpoint those poster’s locations. Then it shows you the picture as in reference to the location.
Wow Karl, that’s really neat. Well yes, it actually is. It is updated every couple of seconds. So you are quickly transported across the globe from the southern US where there is a picture of a large dog following a smaller dog to China where you see a young girl walking down a dirt road in a small village. Then to France where two ladies are talking in a cafe (what else would you expect in France). And then it’s up the former Eastern Block states where there are several twenty somethings reading a bulletin board in a boring blue hallway.
The point is it is in incredibly captivating. We’ve all seen those books that chronicle a city or country photographically for a 24 hour period. This is the entire world in real time. Just staggeringly amazing. If you want to see how important you are and give yourself a sense of proportion, then watch Flickrvision for 5 minutes. It has a similar effect to the Total Perspective Vortex except on a global scale, not universal. And yet, it doesn’t have the effect of turning your mind to mush.
For me, it is a moving experience to see a quick, voyeuristic glimpse into all these people’s lives. A glimpse, I might add, that they invited us to take. Since Flickr uses open source licensing, everything posted there is free for use as long as it isn’t for commercial gain.
I highly recommend you take a look. I think you will stay for a while.
Oh, you may be wondering why I started with the whole conversation about Twitter at the beginning there. Quite simple really. David Troy, the same guy who created Flickrvision also created Twittervision which does the same thing with tweets.
