Please take our new Fluidinfo UI for a spin
Terry Jones
For the last couple of months we've been hard at work building a UI for
Fluidinfo. See http://fluidinfo.com It's not quite ready for the masses, but
you can do a lot with it already, and we're very excited by it. We'd love to
get feedback from early users and (soon) help getting the word out.
The UI allows universal tagging. By this we mean that you can tag anything
(not just URLs). For example, you can add tags to things like the names of
people, songs, movies, and books. To every Twitter @name, #hashtag, and
tweet URL. To email addresses, zip codes, individual words - literally
anything.
You can optionally use values when tagging. Tagging with values will be new
to many people, but it's a very easy step from traditional tagging without
values. For example, you could put a 'rating' tag onto 'Gone With The Wind'
and give it a value of 7. A tag value can be anything at all. For example, a
comment or a set of keywords. You could put 'longitude' and 'latitude' tags
onto an object, with a numeric value for each.
Perhaps most thought-provoking, a tag value can be a URL (or list of URLs).
So you might tag an image online with a tag named 'related', whose value is
the URL of another image. You might tag something with a 'for-dad' tag,
whose value is the URL of a YouTube video. In the UI, tag values that are
URLs are shown as simplified embedded pages (or images).
Here are some examples to take a look at in Fluidinfo:
Eiffel Tower
http://fluidinfo.com/about/eiffel%20tower
Black Hole Sun (Soundgarden song) (Click "music" on the left)
http://fluidinfo.com/about/black%20hole%20sun%20(soundgarden%20song)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
http://fluidinfo.com/about/the%20wind-up%20bird%20chronicle
The Fred Wilson user (@fredwilson)
http://fluidinfo.com/about/@fredwilson
Please explore the links that appear on the left for the different pages
above. Different things appear depending on the tags on the object.
If you're a Twitter user, please login via the Twitter button (top right)
Other login options will be available before long. Once logged in, you'll
be able to add your own tags to anything. You'll also see tags from your
friends (well, people you follow on Twitter) clearly marked.
Feel free to look at (and tag!) anything at all. Type whatever you like
into the small box in the top bar and hit RETURN to see it. Try tagging
something with a value that's a URL.
When logged in, click your avatar image (top right), to go to the @username
object we're using for users. Feel free to tag yourself. When looking at
that object, in the links that appear on the left you'll see 'elsewhere'.
Click it, then click 'Import metadata' next to the Twitter icon. We'll then
tag all the @names, #hashtags, and URLs you've mentioned on Twitter. You'll
then be able to go to Fluidinfo pages for things you've mentioned on
Twitter, and see your 'mentioned' tag on them. E.g., have a look at
http://fluidinfo.com/about/#!/#occupy and you'll see tags on it whose value
are the URL of recent tweets Paul Kedrosky and I made that mentioned
#occupy. (Paul has done the Twitter import step too.)
You may find it useful to use a browser extension. The extensions are very
simple for now. They make it easy to get from any web content or link to the
Fluidinfo page for that thing. Select some text on a web page, or hover over
a link or image, right-click, and you'll see a context menu option to take
you to Fluidinfo for whatever you're looking at. The idea is that any web
user should be able to quickly jump into Fluidinfo for any thing, see their
tags on it, their friends' tags on it, and be able to tag the thing easily.
Soon the extensions will allow you to tag without leaving the page you're on.
With the new UI we're closing in on the long-term aim of Fluidinfo: to make
the digital world fully writable. We've made it possible for anyone to
annotate (tag) anything, without asking for permission or having their needs
anticipated. The massive value in this is that when people and applications
put related but independent information in the same place, search across
those data sets becomes possible. We're not yet exposing a search interface,
though feel free to ask us about the secret built-in Quake terminal if you're
curious :-)
The above is a fairly terse overview of some of things you can do - please
feel free to ask for help / details.
Specific things we'd like feedback on once you've played around:
- How would you describe what we've built?
- What do you find it useful for?
- How can it be improved?
We obviously need to provide explanatory pages guiding people through the
UI and the kinds of things they can do. Thoughts on that are welcome too.
Thanks for any time / help you're able to provide.
Terry
svilen dobrev
the new site doesnt seem to work, for my firefox/opera. even /developers/ takes nowhere
Daniel Kauwe
This is so exciting!
Michael Sullivan
i'm very interested, as always, in your developments.
i do regret not getting actively involved with you guys like i had planned.
i like the direction you took fluidinfo. it's looking deep and massive
and useful.
hoping to use fluidinfo in twentytwelve.
i have some new ideas that could work with fluidinfo.
i'll try to be a more prolific user and offer my feedback, time permitting.
cheers!
sull
Terry Jones
> talk about eating your own dogfood!
Yes :-)
> i'm very interested, as always, in your developments.
> i do regret not getting actively involved with you guys like i had planned.
Well, it's never too late. Now that we have a UI up, there's (I hope) bound
to be more activity around Fluidinfo from non programmers. Hopefully that
will snowball into there being more apps, etc.
> i like the direction you took fluidinfo. it's looking deep and massive
> and useful.
Great, I'm glad you like it. We still have a way to go on the UI, but a big
part of that (splash screen) will hopefully be out this week.
> hoping to use fluidinfo in twentytwelve.
> i have some new ideas that could work with fluidinfo.
> i'll try to be a more prolific user and offer my feedback, time permitting.
OK, thanks, and happy new year!
Terry
Terry Jones
> This is so exciting!
I'm glad you think so. We my tweets to you at all helpful? We'll have more
useful info out very soon.
Terry