We have such an integration ourselves on our front page and elsewhere on our site. We display a few of the latest Tweets from our feed on the right of this page.

But what if you want to have something a bit more graphically inviting combining the Twitter feeds of several accounts. That was exactly what Nirvana CPH was looking for when we built them a Twitter Pulse page.

One of the key challenges when building this page was identifying images that could be displayed along with Tweets. To do this we wanted to extract any images on pages these Tweets links to. (Tweets themselves by default do not have any images).

The challenge is, most webpages have at least dozens of images, many of which have no relevance to the main topic of the page, like images for decorative or advertising purposes. You don’t want to display a banner add, background gradient, or a graphical placeholder as a featured image inside a Tweet.

So we had to make assumptions about the size and the aspect ratio of the typical featured image found on blogs, magazine, newspapers and other sites – basically the image that goes with the story. If we find an image on a page that does not accord, we skip it. If it does match, we suck it from that page, and reformat it for our Twitter Pulse. Nice work.

Read more about our project for Nirvana.

Twitter Intents test

Read all about displaying Tweets ready for action (Retweets, Replies, Follows), here.

Now Twitter must just add the ability to embed these Intents, that would be even better.

Really, the title shoud read: Koblin, Milk and the people that participated in this project. Because rather than cut together some archive footage of the Man In Black, Milk & Koblin developed a drawing tool that allowed the public to draw their own version of each frame of the film. And a stunning 250,000 people took part.

In technique it’s very similar to this Belgian ad from a while ago. But what makes this project work so well are the creative restrictions that are built into Koblin’s drawing tool. They make sure the overall look & feel is consistent.

There are lovely add-ons. From a social point of view, each drawing for each frame can be rated and the most popular frame will become part of the video.

And the drawing tool is so advanced that it will let you play back exactly how a person has drawn their frame.

We can only look forward to what these guys do next.

Yesterday I was quite impressed by the Samsung Shakedown website. To prove how resistant their new phone model is, they set up an ‘interactive’ installation that you could follow live through 4 webcams. The aim was to try and vibrate 1 of 70 phones off a table by calling a certain number. If a phone fell because of your call, you won it. The installation is closed now, but you can still see the demo here.
Smart, experiential, online, live, fun. Ticks quite a few boxes. And I’m sure it wasn’t too expensive either. Hats off to whoever who did it.

And this morning I saw Draft FCB Sweden‘s interactive video page for the Swedish Broadcasting fee. When you go on the page, you can make a ‘Thank you Movie’ by upload a picture of yourself or a friend. You don’t get too much info. Once you’ve done that, it starts playing a short film and soon you realise your picture has been integrated into the story.

Not sure the narrative of the film always fits the message of persuading the fine people of Sweden to pay their license fee (are there Swedish people that don’t? Shock horror!), but there’s something quite hilarious of seeing your friends appear in a high-production value film (some scenes have a Johan Renck quality). Especially if it’s this well done.

I know of Scott Sigler, who got a book deal after he created a community around his sci-fi books by releasing them as podcasts, read by himself (he did different voices for his characters).

I know of people publishing books in progress and I know of Dutch Social Media dude Erwin Blom, who convinced the publishers of his book about Communities to also set up a website. That was used to crowdsource information on online tools and case studies that put his community theories into practice.

And sure, there’s the Kindle, soon the iPad and other e-readers. But so far they mainly focus on changing the distribution and hasn’t had a big impact on the promotion of books, let alone the way stories are being told. Yet.

But then I found this particularly interesting use of augmented reality. It augments exactly what books are all about, telling stories.
Camille Scherrer, a media and interaction design student, created a book that seamlessly integrates Augmented Reality. It’s called ‘Le Monde des Montagnes’ and, well, it’s a book. But the difference is that, once you activate the AR layer (through a lamp!), it superimposes a layer of animation on top of the book that re-interprets and adds to the narrative.

As Camille writes on her website:

“Le Monde des Montagnes” makes the real book – this century-old knowledge transfer medium – cross the path of the “power book”, leading to interaction in a natural, albeit unprecedented language, as an extension of our reality.”

Small note: while Augmented Reality was one of the buzzwords of 2009, she already made this installation in 2008.

The technology behind it seems very powerful, but it’s mainly the way she applies it to enhance the traditional medium and the execution of the animations that got my attention.

Sure, it’s not thé future of book publishing, but it’s definitely a glimpse of how storytelling can and will change.

And there’s more about innovative story-telling on the rather splendid Jawbone website.