Whoa. In the past couple of days I’ve discovered fresh web-based visual effects that give a lot of joy:
1) I am a big supporter of Gmail labels and filters. Since it is my main email box, I use it to subscribe group lists, bills, google alerts as well as receiving personal emails. Labels and filters are extremely useful to help sift through all the messages and for sub-queues – one for personal emails, another for this list, a third for my alerts, etc… Several days ago I noticed that gmail added a coloring scheme (this might be old news?) which lets you set labels to colors – this way I can visually browse through my queue and get a sense for whats waiting for me.
2) Netvibes just came out with a completely new design – visually and conceptually. They provide their users with a private page (what I’ve been using for years) to aggregate RSS feeds, as well as their new ‘ginger’ public interface. Finally they are starting to do interesting things with their user-base. So this is my public page, well equipped with my blog feed, my flickr&twitter feeds, my facebook badge and yet another ‘wall’ for you all to scribble on ::groan:: I know, am way over that. They include a followers/activities tab which just might help make this service catch – its extremely useful for your own use when organizing RSS feeds, but can be extremely helpful when this metadata is shared among a social group. Let people organize the data according to their interests => provide a platform for them to share amongst each other => own a “catchy”, highly used service => … make money ?
Don’t know about the last part, but I’m definitely enjoying playing around with the designs:
3) Piclens is a fantastic way to browse through images. Installs as a browser-app. into firefox and allows to creates a horizontal for viewing images from websites. Cool, slick and intuitive interface. This is how my flickr stream looks through the app:
[tags]visual,design,browsing,netvibes,ginger,gmail,piclens[/tags]