It's takeover time
I’m counting down the hours until thirteen of the many (including myself) head out to Austin for SXSW. Just as the tradition of us sending a swarm over to Texas is well established, so is the idea of South By ‘taking over’ our homepage for the duration. So, here’s a sneak peek at this year’s page (and a reminder of what’s come before).
South By is always a big event for us, but especially this year because of the launch of our own storytelling app, Picle. In previous years we’ve always tried to make the most of existing tools to be able to share our experiences and thoughts whilst we’re out there. This year is going to be different.
In 2010 we used Twitter as the basis for our takeover. Here's our homepage from back then:
The page pulled in our most recent tweets in real-time, grading them on a scale of freshness. A simple idea, but quite good fun (especially when a group of us were in a keynote talk together and the page become a sea of red!).
By the start of the next SXSW Instagram was just beginning to grow big. It’s an app that many of us fell in love with very quickly, so basing our home page on images for 2011 was an easy choice for us:
The page pulled in a seemingly almost constant stream of images from the guys who went out there. For us, this took being able to share our experiences of the event to the next level, especially as capturing moments on Instagram is so quick and easy.
So, to this year. In the past we’ve always had to rely on existing tools to be able to share our time out there. Perhaps that’s what makes SXSW 2012 so exciting: in addition to be able to use Twitter and Instagram, this year we also have our own app to tell stories with. It's something that's going to feature big on this year's take over... Here’s a sneak peek:
Each person has their own timeline, which shows Picle stories, Tweets and Instagrams. We searched for a long time for a way of being able to show 3 different types of content on the same page. In the end we decided to treat them differently. Picle stories are represented as stripes of images (similar to the app itself) whilst Tweets and Instagrams are shown as dots on a continuous wave of content. Clicking on an image will open up a lightbox and play the Picle story, whilst clicking a dot on each person’s wave will show that Tweet or Instagram.
It’s a bit fun and playful, maybe a bit mad. As always though, it’s good to be experimenting with something new...