It has become a very common trend to use Minority Report as a reference whenever referring to interactive visualization interfaces. I came across a video that takes this approach and applies it to Lifestreaming. As soon as I started to watch it I knew it looked familiar to me. That’s because I wrote about it a year ago. The video was created by the Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group.

click image to view on YouTube and select 1080p & expand the view for awesomeness

I decided to repost this not only because it’s a very cool video showing some unique interactive visualizations, but because it was reposted in glorious 1080p HD goodness on YouTube. I’m embedding it below for convenience but I recommend watching it on YouTube and making sure you select the 1080p option and expand its size. Just like when we see concept cars at auto shows, I’m wondering how far out these types of user interfaces are.

Today I discovered a new and very different search engine. Spezify is a new search tool which presents its results using beautiful visual boxes from content it discovers based on search engine results and rich media sites like Flickr, YouTube where it scours to get imagery and even finds ways to present textual content in a pretty fashion. If I had to provide a quick description that many of you would understand it would be if Google married SweetCron and this was their spawn.

Just like any new search tool the first thing you are mandated to do is a vanity search. So when I searched for my name I quickly realized that the results could easily pass as a Lifestream for me. The results included recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Tweets, profile descriptions and more. Now I know this may not be the case for everyone, especially depending on how common your name and its associated results may be, however I found it to be very cool in my case and think it’s worthy of trying for yourself as well.

Beyond being able to use it as a Lifestreaming search engine, you can create really nice visual / informational pages on any topic or entity. Below are several examples to demonstrate this including The Smiths, X PRIZE Foundation (my employer), and Hamburger (my other true love).

After you receive the results page you can click and hold your mouse to scroll up and down as well as left and right to reveal more results dynamically as you scroll. This got me thinking that if these guys partnered up with the folks at Cooliris to provide a 3D visual interface that I might never leave my house. You also have an options page where you can choose whether to include results from various search engines and web services, filter results to include images, video, text, or all of them, or provide “safe” search results. Lastly they also generated related key words based on your search which you can then click on to view their results.

(options page)

Here’s a snip from the Spezify site with their description of the service:

We take web search further, away from endless lists of blue text links and towards a more intuitive experience. We want you to get a good overview of a subject, find useful information and be inspired with Spezify. We collect websites and are aiming to use as many relevant, free and open API:s as possible to generate extensive and diverse search results.

Spezify also reminded me of another nice visual search engine called Viewzi that you should also check out. When I went there tonight to take a look they seemed to have added quite a few more features and have progressed quite nicely since the last time I visited the site.

(my Viewzi results)

We are a visual culture and the nice mix of images, video, and text is a new interface paradigm that is becoming more and more common and seems to really be striking a chord with web  users. I really look forward to watching Spezify evolve and include a larger group of services in their results as they plug into more API’s in the future.

Today I veiwed this really cool video (below) from a presentation at the latest LIFT 2009 Conference. The conference describes itself as “a series of events to inspire and connect the community of doers and thinkers exploring the social impact of new technologies”.

The video shows some rather futuristic ways to both view and interact with your Lifestream. The data is viewed on a large display and using hand gestures to manipulate the data. It’s got a very Minority Report feel to it.

The video goes on to discuss challenges posed once we build over 20 years of Lifestreaming data and shows some unique ways that filtering and deleting would happen from this futuristic interface. They also show possible ways the data might also appear on a mobile phone (iPhone used in the video).

Lifestream – Visualizing my data

It’s really great to see that people are already looking into the future to find exciting new ways to allow us to visualize and interact with data. Of course I’m especially excited to see Lifestreaming used as an example.

UPDATE: Here’s a video provided by reader @ejang of the workshop behind the video put on by Willem Boijens, Vodafone, and Jan-Christoph Zoels, Experientia. You can read more about it here.

Today I came across the Felton Report. What is this report? Well I see a beautiful visual Lifestream. It was created by one Nicholas Felton who is a graphic designer based in New York City. He is also the co-creator of the data-tracking website Daytum.com. I had recently signed up and gotten access to this site which is currently in private beta. On the surface it appeared to be a Lifestreaming site but after playing around for a little it appears to only provide the ability to create lists and data sets manually to generate your stream data and offers no ability to import data or from link to a 3rd party service.

The images below are from 2 pages of his report and show the uniquely interesting method he has used to visualize his Lifestreaming data. I would be interested in getting more information on the tools he used to aggregate the data because as I mentioned I didn’t see that ability in his Daytum service.

You can view the whole report here. He also has other annual reports and design work which can be found online at his site feltron.com and mgfn.net.

A while back Loic Le Meur wrote a post discussing how his social map is decentralized. He also urged others to create their own social maps. Several folks have since created them using wildly different visual ways to interpret and display them using a variety of tools.

• Loic used pen and paper for his original version
• Stowe Boyd created what he calls a social mapplication using a timeline model
• Ben Ullman has created a map with color coding to show frequency & depth
• Brian Solis mapped where he creates, discovers, collaborates and socializes
• Christopher Herot illustrated the complexity of connections among the services he uses

Loic has also setup a site for sharing social maps at socialgraphcentral.wordpress.com.

So I found this to be very interesting and decided to create my own soicial map. I also thought it would be helpful to proivde some tips for others who wanted to do the same. The first decision to make was which tool I would use. As with others, I felt that the best way to create it would be by using a Mind Mapping tool.

I did however have some specific requirements:

• Had to be an online Mind Mapping Service
• Had to be free
• Ability to import images
• Ability to add external links
• Ability to share the Mind Maps

I found the ultimate resource to do my research in the way of a Mashable post on 30+ Mind Mapping Tools. I tried all of the free online services and after weighing my requirements and the features of the various services I felt that Mindomo offered the best solution. If you don’t care about importing images (and frankly it’s a bit time consuming) another service that many others have liked is MindMeister.

So before creating my social map I had to decide on what hierarchical method I wanted to use for creating it. I decided to choose categories that are defined by my interaction methods. That also meant that some services may fall into multiple areas of interaction. I decided on four categories. Create, Consume, Connect,  and Communicate

Next up was providing the method of interaction occurring for each category as well as the services associated with it. So for instance, I had a caegory called “Create”. I then had an interaction for that method called “Comments” and under that interaction I listed 4 services that I use with links to my profiles or where the content lived on the service.

I also created some extended definitions for several services. I primarily use Twhirl to post to Twitter, but I also use it to cross-post to Pownce & Jaiku as well, so that interaction is listed on the map. Another extension is for services that offer multiple methods of displaying user data. You can see the examples I use for Last.fm & Goodreads. I also go on to mention applications that I use to enable functions in my social map such as Trillian for IM, Outlook for email, and Skype for video.

Here is an image of the finished product linked to the map on Mindomo

Click to view interactive map on Mindomo

Overall I found the exercise interesting to get a visual of how we leave our footprint on the web as it relates to Lifestreaming and get more insight into our actions. I also realize that this map is just a current snapshot and it can easily change over time. It gets me thinking of other creative ways I can add to it and I just realized I could have added Yelp under Consume for Food. Oh well, I definitely plan on revisiting the map to see how it changes over time.