Visualize the Social Web with Flotzam

I just learned of Flotzam from Major Nelson, when he referenced it in a recent blog post. (OK, to be honest, I actually learned about this last year, but I forgot). This cool WPF application, built by some folksat Microsoft’s Mix Online, lets you visualize data from social web sites including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, and it also can incorporate RSS feeds. You just configure which services you want the app to display data from and the updates will float down from the top of the screen and lay on top of other updates, similar to the way that blocks fit together in the video game Tetris. The colorful application is great to use in presentations when demonstrating the real-time nature of the social web and how you can track a topic across a number of sites. It’s also just pretty to look at. You can install Flotzam from here or check out the source code here (zip file).