Does Cover Flow work for browsing the Web? Increasingly, I’ve been seeing Flash-based Websites adopt the visual metaphor of Apple’s iTunes Cover Flow as a navigational tool to quickly flip through Web pages (instead of album covers). You can see that in new search engines like SearchMe, and in a news filter that just launched this weekend called Flowww. (Apparently, we are now entering the era of triple-letter misspellings for Websites because all the double-letter misspellings are taken). Flowww lets you flip through about 24 current pages culled from the top 100 tech blogs and news aggregation sites like Digg and Techmeme.
Right now, you will find some of the same stories that you will find on Techmeme and elsewhere, including posts from TechCrunch, GigaOm, O’Reilly Radar, Silicon Alley Insider, Datawocky, TorrentFreak, The New York Times, and Yahoo News. It’s 98 percent tech news, but the site throws in some pop culture stuff and a couple cool photos from Flickr. Eventually, you’ll be able to add your own feeds, or use it to read one particluar source (here’s what it would look like for TechCrunch).
The idea is that many people are having a hard time keeping up with all the news coming at them from their RSS readers, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and everywhere else. So Flowww tries to reduce the noise and present just the most important stuff. It looks at the top tech blogs and the big stories on the news aggregation sites and puts it through a data mining and predictive analysis engine powered by SPSS Clementine. It also takes into account social votes on sites like Digg, Tweets, highly bookmarked stories, and evaluates anything tagged “flowww” on del.icio.us, Flickr, or any other service it monitors. There will also be a way to e-mail in stories for evaluation
Flowww was created by David Zotter, a developer in Connecticut. He won’t really explain what his organizing principle is other than to say it is a “mix between crowd sourcing and predictive analytics” and that “there is large amount of text processing happening to trim down the top news.” He also claims “it should be impossible for a dominant minority from a single source to game the overall rankings,” but refuses to give any details on exactly how it is supposed to do that. (It seems that simply getting lots of people to tag photos and stories with the word “flowww” would be one way to try to game the system).
Ultimately, people will have to decide for themselves if the news presented in Flowww does a better job than other filters. For me, at least, it doesn’t. There are certainly posts and articles there that I would want to read, but many of them are the same ones I can find on TechMeme, Digg, or simply looking at my RSS reader. And there are some I could care less about, like an EW story about American Idol David Cook. I’m not sure why I should trust Flowww to make my reading selections for me, and Zotter doesn’t care to try to explain his approach.
The other issue I have is that, while the site is pretty, the Cover Flow metaphor just doesn’t work for me as a navigational tool. It is too slow and it forces you to look at the pre-selected sites in the order that the algorithm (or Zotter) picks them. If you want to read the middle story, you have to flip through all the previous ones to get to it. I’d rather pick my own stories from a list of headlines, thank you very much.
What do readers think? Would you use it?
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What is this obsession with cover-flowing everything, its great for music, and even that I prefer list view. Why do we need it for all this other stuff.
As much as I find rss to be boring… I thin this is for now a bit of an overkill as the flash is too slow (at least on a macbook first generation) to give a proper experience.
Is this really a triple-letter misspelling, or does Flowww actually have three W’s for a reason?
I was hoping for newfound brevity in TechCrunch. Just say: Cover Flow sucks, don’t copy it. We should all be drunk anyway.
I agree, I think I would rather read based on my own headlines rather than trust an algorithm of another. The fact that I can’t skip around is a bit discouraging also.
This looks pretty cool… gottan love Cover Flow!
Not my kind of thing, really. I like RSS readers for their simplicity and “just the facts, ma’am” approach to sifting news stories by presenting me with the text and maybe an image. Safari has History Flow however that’s kind of useless as it doesn’t render the page in the history… I guess I don’t have much use for it outside a cool effect in iTunes / on my iPod.
I find this new found verbiage rather disturbing, Michael
Cover Flow is form without substance. It slows down the process of everything it’s used with. Let’s just put it in the “ideas that didn’t work” file and be done with it.
“(Apparently, we are now entering the era of triple-letter misspellings for Websites because all the double-letter misspellings are taken).”
zOOOmr.com is pretty old actually.
But that’s why Yahoo Inc! bought flickr instead.
>>>Is this really a triple-letter misspelling, or does Flowww actually have three W’s for a reason?
Coverflow + WWW = Flowww.
We were attempting with a nice flowwwwwwwwww, short in length, and easily remembered.
It is a real bear to come up with a new name with an available matching domain.
Plus, one person pointed out that future subdomains for a site could be named flowww.something.com
Hah! I knew the three-letter domain misspelling would have its day!
Philip Kaplan
Spottt
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....kexchange/
SearchMe’s cover flow implementation is much smoother and less visually jarring than Flowww.
I’ve found the cover flow system in general to be great for for pornography.
commenttt!
It seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Using cover flow in other area is interesting but backfire easily because cover flow may work for minor collection thing like album but ineffective against myriad headline and information.
What is exactly user need from RSSFeeder ? They need to glance and browse through interesting headline with few click and less screen as possible and that is the primary need however CoverFlow sacrifice the primary functionality by giving coolness and visual effect that result in more click, more screen change.
It might seem cool at first but the interest will die down soon
It’s TOO SLOW.
If you think about it, CoverFlow work quickly as a navigational tool in OS X because you don’t ever need to download the functionality. It’s just part of OS X.
I will try if I remember the number of www’s in their name.
This idea is great. They should let users add teir own RSS feeds to customize Flowww. Maybe they already do this.
Slowww (ouch) and doesn’t scale to my screen size. FAIL.
This is about as lame as tag-cloud everything, or tree-map everything, and other gimmicks. Ask yourself if you’re prefer Google search results as a “cloud”, or simply listed top to bottom in order of rank.
However, if history is any guide, they’ll soon be reporting that this is worth $500 million and that it’s “in play” for acquisition.
Well I’ve gotta say it looks nice but that’s pretty much it. I would rather save a session with tabs of each site I read feeds from and go through it all that way.
Right now it seems pretty much pointless, but even when they add some functionality to add your own feeds, mark as read, etc. it just isn’t my cup of tea. Maybe I’m behind as far as screen resolution settings go but I really get annoyed with sites that scroll in left and right.
This idea is great. They should let users add teir own RSS feeds to customize Flowww. Maybe they already do this.
ah,I like it Tech News
Nice idea, cool stuff, but I a big fan of YourErgo.com for my search results - the flow using Ergo is much faster, and there is no poor attempt to look cool with too many letters!
Interesting idea, BUT:
1. interface needs a lot (i mean A LOT) of improvement;
2. I cannot decide what source I want to pull the feeds from;
3. there’s no summary or tag anywhere in the pages presented (unlike searchme) so going through the news will take WAY longer than regular feeds (especially if they choose them for me)
4. cover flow is a sexy and efficient way to pick a picture from a collection; works well with sites like visualcv.com, but it’s a different story when it comes to get NON VISUAL information. Our children may be more comfortable with that tomorrow; for now it’s just too early to rely on this single technology (especially when the implementation is… well… flawwwed).
just try this url :
http://www.web2wave.com/userDi.....=travel_us
you can create you account and add Posts.
They should have waited for the Flash Player 10 with its 3D effects support…
Right now its not fast and stable enough!
Hi all,
Please visit this site : http://www.hsiplabs.com
Regards,
Christy.
Would I use it? In a heart beat. Already have on my Favorites Bar. Can rapidly scan top news stories on many webstes. Kudos to Flowww!
You can create image galleries with the cover flow look with the Jalbum gallery software (skin: LightFlow). It’s pretty cool.
I really like the presentation of websites this way. I could run a bit smoother, but all in all I like it.
@john
Looks pretty much like what flowww would like to achieve.
Still, I don’t really see the point of wheeling through a set of frontpage screenshots:
- they’re too small to be easily readable (ok, this one may be solved pretty soon with faster browsers);
- there’s too much data in there, i just need a title and/or a summary.
I think this kind of start page doesnt do its job: pointing at the essential so you can quickly get there. They’re doing just the opposite with their tabs and widgets (each of which loads the WHOLE home page of each site…ouch.)
That visual thing is clearly the future of browsing, but we’re definitely not there yet (afaik).
@ Not for nowww
it’s just a different way (visual bookmarking) to manage your favorites,
CoverFlow is a controversial concept - people either love it or hate it. One could argue that CoverFlow makes sense in iTunes as you can view all of your music just like the ol’ days by flipping through your virtual CD covers. One could also argue that it makes sense in the Finder because you can view all of your documents with a scaled down instant preview without even having to open them.
Hang on a minute, though - when was the last time you browsed through your internet history? How long did it take to find what you were looking for? It’s true - currently, internet browser history sucks. To make a start, things need to be more visual.
second point this is not a exactly a RRS-start page like protopage, netvibes…
I frequently visited dozen of website everyday, probably like you. We usually do same usual things on the web, for example checking eBay, read the news, online banking, write a blog, and so on… this is something that can’t be done by RSS-startpage
Why not adding you Rss-startpage into W2W tabs ?
This won’t fly unless/until each view can be counted for advertising. Then, I’d say it’s compelling and worth investing to develop the tabbing and freedom that others here are demanding. The problem with RSS, of course, is that unless the publisher gives you full-feed 2.0, it’s just headlines. This would/could remove the unwillingness of publishers to completely unbundle, but again, it would require the ability to somehow count the ad impressions.
An other Flex app : a graphic search engine podcast, YouTube Flickr …
http://www.mirpod.com/mirtube_videos
You’re probably right Terry but just try to open several websites with W2W
Create your own account http://www.web2wave.com
or use a thematic accounts:
http://www.web2wave.com/userDi.....=travel_us
and then use the built-in features of IE or Firefox . It works well, but as most people know, the list will become quite long and unmanageable……
@john
OK granted, it’s definitely not an RSS startpage. And the idea is pretty cool.
Still, as a French user, I cant help whining
- as for reading news, im doing just fine with Netvibes
- getting to my favorite places is lightspeed-quick with the FF3 address bar
- i still dont feel the added comfort of viewing 3 or 4 pages at the same time in “surflets”
Now I admit the coverflow thing is pretty cool. Why not replacing surflets with page flows (one per tab, with larger thumbnails)?
The news is stale; the site is slow; the experience is pitiful; what’s the point?
Let me Import an OPML and put in on AIR and I’ll use it.
There is a similar site that have this kind features it called spacetime 3D , 3D search,Tab and so on.It’s nice , but i don’t use it , it uses a lot of memory in my computer.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
I enjoyed the visual aspect of the site-it gives me more information than just the headline. I also think there will be future applications with children who are more enticed by the visual component than just a written summary or headline
I disagree the news is stale. I also prefer the visual nature-it was not slow on my computer and fit my screen perfectly. Interesting concept!
i too was sick of my rss reader - so i built a an aggregator (on wordpress w/ a couple of plugins) to clear the clutter.
i guess it could be called the exact opposite of flowww. but it works for me and a couple of friends.
http://altread.com (its slow, though - but ill fix it someday)
It sounded fairly interesting until my Firefox crashed twice when I attempted to view their site. So I gave up that idea. This may work for those who take the visually appealing services over the more practical. Though it is fair game (since quite a few people actually would take the shiny over the dull - this is including those who aren’t completely tech savvy and those who are), I have my doubts on it. Is this one of those services that happens to be all spiff and no substance? And in my opinion, the triple ‘w’ is slightly tacky. I think I’ll stick with Google Reader when it comes to reading my choice of news.
@ Not for nowww
Pour être aussi exigeant il fallait bien que ce soit en Français ….
de la bouffe !
Alors un voici un webfolio thématique pour un Français
http://www.web2wave.com/userDi.....cuisine_fr
;
Sorry this short french discussion
Very similar to the Vista implementation of the ALT+Tab feature. I guess if you had IE open in several windows, you could flip like this as well.
Hey Erick,
“It is too slow and it forces you to look at the pre-selected sites in the order that the algorithm (or Zotter) picks them. If you want to read the middle story, you have to flip through all the previous ones to get to it.”
If you look to the right and just click on the furthest story you can see, it goes straight there, so you can skip through about six at a time.
Hope that helps and saves time.
Cheers,
John.
it’s not user friendly as it looks …
the naviagation looks cool but doesnt solve any problem rather it creates problems, first of all it made my system slow, secondly I cannot jump directly to any story without fliping through all pages.
Another example of just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.
I guess the next one we see is our news feeds all represented by little thumbs and we deep zoom into them. A great one off concept, but impossible to use to quickly scan your feeds.
Incredibly slow and clunky for me. Practically is crashing Safari (might just be the computer).
I don’t get it. So they used a web page imaging application that pulls from an RSS and then the images toss into a flash cover flow component? They bought the flash component from somewhere which hooks directly up to XML. Where is the technology? This can’t be a business idea. Lame… Does TechCruch have anyone technical on their team to evaluate this stuff before you post it to your site?