Project info: Miomi
Technology: AJAX, ASP.NET
License: Closed source, commercial
In the last of my roundup of pre-existing timeline projects I'm taking a look at Miomi, a social-network timeline started by three students from Germany. The site allows users to create their own timelines and share them with anyone. This project differs from the others I've looked at in two significant ways. Firstly it's a closed-source commercial endeavour and secondly the content focus is on personal rather than global history.
The 'shiny buttonised' design, although modern and friendly, is the default look for all web2.0 startups and long become a cliche. Thinking about design I think I'd like to go with something a bit more 'infomatic'. I'll probably explore this more in a future post.
When I first saw the timeline interface it looked so seemless I was convinced it was rendered in Flash. Digging into the code however reveals it to be an impressive AJAX construction. It is these timeline interface controls that makes Miomi fun to play with.
The timeline stretches the entire width of the browser and users can easily explore it by dragging left and right. The temporal granularity or 'zoom' level of the timeline can be set using a slider on the side. In addition to this users are able to drill down or enter their own 'moments' onto the timeline.
Thinking about personal history it seems realistic to be able to produce a dynamic personal timeline showing your web activity from Flickr, delicious, Digg, Twitter etc by aggregating your own RSS feeds. Cool!
