Fichey: Striking Web Visuals Served Up Rotational
I consider myself a web cultist (or web geek if you like), a distinct difference in my view from a gadget cultist or hardware cultist. Don’t get me wrong: I bow at the altar of all things tech, but I consider the computer or device merely the means through which to access the magical interwebs.
That is to say, I don’t find myself all that taken with the ongoing, never-ending Mac vs. PC debate. I’ve always been a PC person… because I’ve always been a PC person. They gain me access to the online world just fine. That said, there’s no doubt that the visuals on Apple products are striking. And as an overall trend, I’m noticing that the Internet itself is rolling out services and applications that emphasize the simple, elegant, striking visual experience that Apple innovated on in its hardware products.
For example, Fichey is a neat little website that rotates through the top stories on a bunch of popular news aggregators, such as Google News, Digg, Reddit, and delicious. “Meta” news aggregators, or websites that simply collect a bunch of stories from other news services (such as Pop URLs) have been around for years. What Fichey does differently is that it make things incredibly simple and incredibly visual. Pick a service, click “next site,” and the entire web page rotates (very-Apple like!) to the next story, so you’re actually seeing the original webpage instead of a headline.
I think we’re going to see a lot more of Fichey-like services over the next year or two. I can see widgets that rotate through popular web stories as being popular. Instead of getting inundated with yet more text links, seeing a splash of color rotate through an application you use all day (such as GMail, for example) would be really fun. Think Bitty turned into a rotating Fichey-like application.
And then of course there’s video, which for many people is the singular reason to hit the interwebs these days. Google Alerts has just announced that it will include video search as part of its popular application (set a Google Alert for, say, 2008 presidential elections, and you’ll get sent news, blogs, other web pages, and now video if you like associated with that term as content gets published and indexed on the web).
It’s not hard to imagine a Fichey-meets-video-meets-widget becoming an extremely popular must-have for the web geek set, and perhaps the wider MySpace/Facebook-loving masses as well.
More likely it will be some wrinkle on this theme that can’t be foreseen by me or anyone else at this time, which is all part of the mystery and allure of being a web cultist!
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September 26th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Fichey is pretty darn cool.
And yes, it’s very Mac-like, but we’ll leave that alone for now.
I count on you web cultists to ferret out the good stuff the rest of us are too lazy or inept to find on our own.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
As a proud web cultist, I can’t *not* ferret around for the good, bad, and ugly on the Internet, so I’m very very glad that you appreciate my findings!