We love the visual web.
We love the visual web.
When we started work on Clove two years ago, our goal was to create a centralized hub to gather all of the great content from the blogs we follow, our twitter and facebook friends, and any of the dozen plus social networks and websites we visit daily. We soon realized that once we had all of that content in one place, it became overwhelming. There was too much to read through and we found ourselves gravitating towards anything with an attached photo or video.
Our thoughts then shifted to, “How can we create a visually minded interface for this content? How can we find only the GREAT content?”
The answer was surprisingly easy. Our friends and followers were already sharing links and photos all around us. All we needed to do was count how often each story or picture was shared. We also realized we could pull stats from sites like reddit and digg, among others. We then were able to get a picture of what our group of friends found most interesting.
Now, because the both of us are photographers, we noticed a lot of great photography content floating to the top thanks to the algorithmic filter. We began to wonder if we could apply this algorithmic sort to other content beyond photography. Passionate cooks, writers, musicians, artists, engineers, developers, gardeners… all were sharing great content on twitter, facebook, youtube, vimeo and countless RSS enabled blogs.
We realized we had a tool to turn a bunch of topical feeds into an algorithmically curated visual dashboard. We then set out to create an interface, focused on absolute simplicity, for any user to create one of these automatically updated & curated feeds.
Cliq.ly is that dashboard.
