It's been coming for a while in plain sight but Dave has now put a name to it: FlickrFan. Is it something new? Seemingly not but, knowing Dave, I know he is seeing something I currently cannot see. And the chance of mis-focusing is pretty high. Software is magic, folks. Like the way one can put meanings between lines of words, one can capture something wonderful between lines of code, even crappy code, code that anyone can write but all too often fails to capture anything but vain eye candy or crippled features.
I still remember hearing about Dave's Living Video Text two decades ago. It seemed mundane at first glance and it took many years before I saw it on store shelves. But his outliner idea dawned on me eventually. Since then, there were scriptable apps, blogging, and podcasting. I don't know why ideas he gets attracted to always end up being late bloomers but, thankfully, his persistence gives us time to come around eventually. When a mountaineer points at something, one should not focus on his finger.
Is FlickrFan a start of something wonderful or will it be much ado about nothing? Frankly, I don't know but I also don't see much return in being a premature critic or a flip-flop.
This is what I am seeing in FlickrFan at the moment:
FlickrFan captures and projects images from a user's social network without all the clutter of web user interface. Photos of friends floating by on the big ass screen you paid thousands of dollars for, every day and every glance, in every gorgeous detail, each throbbing HD pixel filled with bits and hearts of the world you choose to care.
Now, if you had to choose between the FlickrFan show and "Deal or No Deal", which would you choose?
As I just mentioned elsewhere, TiVo has offered this capability for years, and you can do the same thing with a standard aggregator and an Xbox. After a couple days of pretending you're Bill Gates with your own house full of LCD picture frames, you either flip over to the DVR and watch something, play a game, or get off the couch entirely.
Now, where it *would* be useful is as a built-in screensaver for a DVR... it's there when I'm not actively watching something, and instantly, seamlessly disappears when I decide to use the device. I'd be a bit surprised if the MythTV guys haven't been tinkering with something like that already.
http://chirpscreen.com/
http://wiki.linuxmce.com/index.php/Screenshots
The screens saver pans and scans then crossfades to the next image... images can be from Flickr & local storage
:-)
