Multimedia aggregation

1 /4

Concept

Neyun is a rich web application which lets users navigate and query through all their pictures, emails, messages, videos and links, no matter where they came from: social media, email, RSS feeds (hey, it was 2009!).

2 /4

Requirements & Context

Back when social media first broke into our lives, a variety of social platforms quickly emerged and gained traction: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, and many others. This, in addition to email platforms, messaging tools and online repositories, created an increasingly hard to navigate digital experience.

The concept for Neyun was born as a way to easily aggregate different types of content from a variety of sources. But it didn’t stop there: as with all of our internal projects, we wanted to take the opportunity to experiment with tools and technologies that were promising.

3 /4

Approach

Neyun automatically imports all of the users’ data and extracts tags from it. Then it allows them to visualize it in an homogeneous way, just like if it all came from the same application. Those tags were then organized into a tag cloud (as we said, this was back in 2009) that were used to filter the data by selecting one of them to see all its elements, or intersecting two of them to see elements tagged with both.

Neyun’s front end was fully coded in Silverlight, an application framework designed by Microsoft for writing and running rich web applications. The database was another promising technology back in ‘09: Amazon’s SimpleDB. Sadly, both technologies were discontinued shortly after, but SimpleDB planted the seeds of what eventually became DynamoDB.

4 /4

Results

Neyun is, at its heart, the quintessential visualization tool: users can activate several different views to group elements matching their search criteria, cross reference them with content from other sources, and organize them by type, theme or date. And if filters are not enough, Neyun allows users to do a full text search over the elements.