I’ve written before about Cooliris, a cool piece of software that lets you browse images and videos by zooming past a 3D Wall of thumbnails. It’s certainly more entertaining than standard methods for browsing media, and arguably more efficient as well–the wall lets you scan massive quantities of items without having to click a “Next Page” link over and over again.
Cooliris started out as an alternative to more mundane methods of browsing, but the company has lately been working on injecting its Walls into the Web as we kow it. Earlier this week, it updated me on embeddable walls and Cooliris Express, two features that let anybody easily create walls and bring them into sites of all sorts–no Cooliris plug-in required. (These Walls are Flash-based.)
As their name suggests, embdeddable walls sit inside other Web pages; Cooliris Express is a tool for specifying what media is featured in a Wall. You can use items from Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, or Facebook, or tap a MediaRSS feed to insert content from any source. Items in the walls you create now have quick links for sharing via Facebook or Twitter, and the company says it’s speeded up the performance of walls as you swoop around. And the Walls you embed are ad-free (unless you want to participate in a program that lets you display ads and get a cut of the profits).
All this is easier to show than explain. Here’s a silly little Wall that displays a feed of YouTube videos with the keyword “TRS-80.” I created it in about 30 seconds.
[techno-cooliris]