WWD Coffee Break – Gridjit, Books & Metasearch

ScreenshotA New View of TwitterGridjit is a data visualization tool for Twitter. Unlike most of the Twitter clients out there, which focus on presenting the same chronological stream of tweets as the web site and letting you post your own, Gridjit only displays data. But it does so in a novel grid form, grouping tweets by person rather than by time, and allowing easy drill-through to see who’s been talking to who lately. The result is a different impression of the Twitterverse, and one that makes it easier to follow conversations.

Now that social media is starting to mature, I think there’s room for more experiments along these lines. Our ability to contribute chatter through the many ways that we’re connected is well-developed, but our ability to visualize exactly how it all fits together is lagging. I look forward to seeing what interesting things we can do with our mutual connections.

Better Book Finding – No matter how much you live on the web, most of us still turn to printed books from time to time. Book Burro is a little FireFox (and Flock) add-in designed to make finding books easier. It detects when you’re looking at a web page with an ISBN, and puts up an expandable panel in the corner of the page. Click the panel, and you can see the price of the book on a selection of book sites (you configure which ones), as well as check your local libraries for availability. It’s nice to have the web saving time and money.

Metasearch Done Almost Right – There are a batch of metasearch engines out there, starting with the venerable Dogpile. Over the weekend I ran across Clusty, which has some features I really like. It uses information from multiple search engines to group results into cluster, but even better, it lets you add your own tabs to the front page (a la “web,” “news,” and so on) and select the search engines that make up each tab. Alas, the selection of search engines you can choose from is not great.

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