Simulacra

March 27, 2011 5:15 PM

bloom.io develops "pop-cultural instruments for data expression": Fizz takes your Facebook or Twitter connections and shows growth and changes to your social ecosystem. Cartagram places geo-located photos from Instagram on the surface of the planet. Newsmap (Flash required) draws Google News sources from different countries and visually treemaps them. The developer of Newsmap, Marcos Weskamp, also wrote the Etsy geolocator and Flipboard, a personalised social magazine for iPad.

Newsmap has been posted on the blue several times before, but the URL used in those posts has since changed.

posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul (9 comments total)

It looks like the first link is an email harvester.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:24 PM on March 27, 2011

bloom.io has a blog that gives a bit more info.
posted by vidur at 5:35 PM on March 27, 2011

It looks like the first link is an email harvester.

Scroll down.
posted by birdherder at 6:15 PM on March 27, 2011

I guess I don't see what Fizz does except look kind of cool, which is maybe enough. I connected with my Twitter account and it pulled the last 8 hours of my followees' activity. I learned that 3 people do a disproportionate amount of tweeting, but I have to click on each of the circles to see what they said. A hashtag cloud might be more informative.

I don't get Cartagram, either. Someone's ugly dog covers the entire US Southwest. I typed in my location (Milwaukee, WI) and got a picture of someone else's ugly dog. None of the pictures seem to say anything about their places. Maybe the takeaway is that people who use instagram are bad, boring photographers.
posted by desjardins at 7:55 PM on March 27, 2011

I'll look through these, thanks! I've got way too many Facebook friends to keep track of normally. using Fizz now. i think it's helpful for seeing how frequently people update (and making me feel better about my constant updates)
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 9:40 PM on March 27, 2011

bloom is led by an ex-Stamen Design (crimespotting.org, digg labs, moveon.org) guy. whatever they do will be beautiful, that's for sure. Also, Marcos didn't singlehandedly make Flipboard, just to be fair to the other extremely talented people on the team.
posted by Señor Pantalones at 10:58 PM on March 27, 2011

Can someone please explain to me the value and/or utility of these things, without the high-level, breathless geek-speak and marketing hyperbole? I mean...beyond mapping-out your social media connections and their activity, using über-kewl graphics, I'm not seeing the point.

I'm starting to get the feeling we're lapsing into an age of "data visualization for the sake of data visualization" without any real reason or use for said data visualizations...other than to brag about being able to see the data in some shiny new way.
..and get off my lawn...
posted by Thorzdad at 4:00 AM on March 28, 2011

Flipboard is valued at $200M, despite not having any revenue.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 4:51 AM on March 28, 2011

@thorsdad couldn't agree more. just the endless cycle of designers trying to set themselves apart from other designers while also desperately trying to be other designers. 1990s everyone wanted to be josh davis, 2000 everyone wanted to be apple, this decade seems to all want to be nick felton.
posted by Señor Pantalones at 5:44 PM on April 12, 2011