Streamosphere update
This month's iteration of Streamosphere is now up. It's still more a preview than a product but imho it's approaching usefulness!
The main changes are:
- a new way of exploring the site - the list view shows you the most popular items within a given time frame. It's sort of like Digg but to vote an item up you need to have commented on it or shared it on a social media site.
- simplified sidebar, visual cues on the grid / timeline view and a help link will hopefully help new users work out what they're seeing
- the aggregation logic now uses Friendfeed's SUP feed and connects directly to Twitter, so messages are picked up much faster.
- trending topics - this is a list of topics that are appearing more frequently than you might expect. Bear in mind that it's generated algorithmically so items are sometimes grouped together in odd (but technically correct ;)) ways...
- clicking on "see details" in the list view or on an item in the grid view brings up a breakdown of comments and tweets which you can use to jump straight into a conversation on, for example, Friendfeed.
There are still lots of little niggles. On smaller timescales (anything under than four hours) there's lots of items that aren't strictly speaking about science, too. Still not sure if that's a bug or a feature.
The next version will focus on people - both the people being followed by Streamosphere and visitors to the site - and grouping items by topic.
