It’s been out for a couple days now in Digg labs, but I have to finally say that Digg’s Swarm is pretty pimp… It will be fun when they release their API and we can start building our own stuff.
Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they’re dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.
Check it out for yourself:
This is kind of addictive especially when you start dragging aronud the stories and the others attached follow your mouse around.
You can also use it as your screensaver:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/icons_screensavers/idleweb.html
(Should look nice on those 30″es…)
Also rootin’ for the API!
I also found favor with the swarm ‘tool’. As well as the screensaver [I spied this standalone version: http://www.roflsoftware.com/diggscreensaver/Download.html%5D …spans on dual screens as well, as opposed to mirroring…double pimp.
so, is this like the Ghost Program you wrote for your forum that shows new posts as they happen? Only a much more complicated interface that is appealing to the masses (and when I say masses, i mean my muscles)?
It’s like the Spy Shawn did but this is Flash based and a bit more advanced indeed. Like gravity and momuntum etc. when you see the stories bounce off eachother and be pushed and pulled towards other stories. It’s quite interesting how it’s almost like a Geographical Information System with topographical features describing interrelatedness and ‘location’ correlation. And route calculation when the user ‘flies off’ to the other story. Fascinating stuff.
If you combine it with something like the VisitorVille real time log file analysis you can create evolving dynamic and real time interactive cities with stories as buildings and users as people, using various forms of transportation to move between stories. SimCity Digg-style.
Can’t wait for the API!
BTW for those eager to start hacking up code, the API was reverse enginered from Swarm/Stack already:
http://serverboy.net/wiki/Digg