Office Snapshots, Twitter and why I love the www
Yesterday I was talking with Jessi about Craigslist and I remembered that a random stumble had taken me to a site which showed the office that Craigslist runs out of in San Francisco. It was quite different to your usual office space, looking more like someone’s house inside, so this evening I set about rediscovering the site in question. That site turned out to be Office Snapshots and as you can imagine, I then spent a fair while browsing through various pictures of other company offices.
Upon clicking on Twitter’s entry, there was an embedded video from a video podcast Robert Scoble did for PodTech, interviewing various people at Twitter on their roles and what Twitter is all about. Regular visitors will no doubt have noted that I use Twitter myself and make use of their API to display my twitters (twitterings?) on this site. However, the podcast showed that there is so much more to the app than I’d really investigated. They showed some interesting mashups that utilised twitter, my favourite of which was Twittervision. This harnesses the APIs of Twitter and Google Maps to show live updates to Twitter’s public timeline on a map of the world. It may not sound thrilling in writing, but it’s strangely mesmorising when you pay the site a visit.
So one conversation triggered a memory which led to a chain reaction of link after link after link. This got me to thinking - this is why I like the web. With all the amazing apps and e-commerce improvements and amazing communication possibilities that are (rightfully) gathering all the attention, it’s easy to take for granted the simplest concept behind the WWW - hyperlinking.
Tags: apis, links, offices, officesnapshots, podtech, scoble, twitter, web, www
