Here comes a new idea directly from Japan to make life on the web a little easier.
Llamerada, a Japanese web engineer, coded a Flickr mashup on AJAX interface. He announced the release today on his blog.
So what is this about?
The basic idea is to make search on Flickr more comfortable. Llamerada wanted to display as many as 16,000 photos in grid style (retrieved by Flickr’s API and based on Flickr tags), make use of Google Maps flavored AJAX interface and arrange similar photographs close to each other within the grid by using a self-developed algorithm.
The new service is named “TagGrid of Flickr Popular Tags”.
As can be seen on the screenshot, the overall view of tags comes to play in the box on the right hand side. However, various tags like “Japan”, “girls”, “animals”, “Ireland” etc. are wildly mixed together on the “map”. Some of the tags form a cloud, making them impossible to read.
Pictures tagged “animal”, for example, are grouped in the box on the left. In fact, browsing by tags is more comfortable this way. However, similar photos were not necessarily arranged next to each other when I tried out the application.
So some more work needs to be done to make this cool idea worthwile. There is no language or cultural barrier here so it is easy to check TagGrid out yourself.
Serkan Toto
It’s neat to see these first applications coming out from developers who have gotten invites to Google App Engine. And this is the first one I have seen from a Japanese developer. Can’t wait until App Engine is opened to the general public.