David Emery OnlineEventBox
8 November 2008
Any long time reader will know that I’ve got a passing interest in a few upcoming web-ey trends (which seem to more often then not have slightly silly names); life streams and ambient interactivity come squarely in that category.
Life streams, for the uninitiated, are aggregate feeds of personal data – think someone’s Twitter, Flickr and Blog feeds all rolled up into one stream you can dip in and out of. Ambient interactivity is more of concept then a ‘thing’, but very much compliments life streams; as soon as you start combining multiple feeds of data together you very readily get to the point of overload if you try to interact and feed back into things – if every time you need to reply to someone you have to login to twitter, or to post a photo you have to trek over to flickr it becomes unwieldy. The idea of ambient interactivity is to make these things incredibly easy to do, so you can interact in an ‘ambient’ way without taking your main focus off what you’re doing.
Up until now there was no easy way of achieving either of these two things; there’s a few web based life streaming apps, most prominent of them being FriendFeed but I’m not a fan of any of them – they seem to be concerned about creating their own network as opposed to being a client to others. Also, none of them really facilitate interactivity across the sites that I use, and I’m really after a desktop app.
That’s where EventBox, a new Mac life streaming app comes in.
EventBox works a little like a cross between NetNewsWire and Twitterific. Down the source pane on the side you see all the sources you’ve added (from a list including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Pownce, Digg, Reddit and RSS) with the ‘Recent’ option collecting them together in one big stream. The main pane then shows your newest content, complete with all sorts of CoreAnimation powered swooshy animations and fades – it’s all very slick.
Unsurprisingly for something that acts as a Twitter client you can also interact as well, whether that’s posting or reply to tweets or uploading photos to Flickr or Facebook – it’s all done inline and exceptionally easy.
I’ve been involved behind the scenes of this app for quite a while – it was originally my idea (the brief: “Can you make Twitterific but for Flickr, Facebook and RSS too?”) but they’ve taken it so much further – it’s one of the most useful and polished new apps I’ve come across in ages, and has instantly replaced both Twitterific and RSS in Mail.app for me (I like to have a small subset of work RSS feeds updated in a desktop app so I get notifications about them – I’m still reading 800+ feeds in Bloglines as well…).
The integration of Facebook photos and status in with Twitter and Flickr is really useful for me – I have a fairly even split of friends, half of which use Twitter and Flickr (cough the geeks) and the other half (the ‘normal’ people) that use Facebook, so having them together makes a huge amount of sense.
EventBox is only in beta at the moment, and there’s a few more things to be added until it’s perfect (the HUD looks exceptional, and I’d like to see Last.fm support and maybe Delicious as well) but as it stands it’s easily worth the £12 they’re charging.