Hunch

Hunch Timeline displays events in the beginning of August 2008

Since the first deployment of Hunch Aggregator I’ve had the idea of visualizing the aggregated data in a timeline. Since then I’ve written some timeline visualizations and backends – none of them really good. Today I found out about MIT SIMILE Timeline. I’ve used this piece of open source software to create the Hunch Timeline.

By passing any ISO 8601 date with the URL hash/anchor, you can initiate the viewport at a specific time. Examples:

• #2008-08-07
• #2007
• #2008-02
• #2006-05-06 09:00

Please note that the timeline data sets are huge, which might result in long loading times.

You navigate and scroll the timeline simply by clicking and dragging with your mouse, or by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

I’ve never written about this piece of software before, but have gotten a few questions about it recently, so I thought I’d shed some light on things.

The Hunch Aggregator is a pretty simple thing – it keeps a central state of many addressable online services. Once upon a time, I created and managed most services myself, like hosting images, blogging, chatting, etc. Suddenly better services than those which I have written popped up – Flickr, Jaiku/Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Google Reader and so on. So like any pragmatic tech-savvy user would do, I distributed the tasks. Outsourced the pain in the ass of keeping things up to date and working. Now, a new problem arouse: I am one person, but to the outside, the myriad of services did express several different users. Different “persons” or identities. All I want is my friends to be able to hear me, not spend all their time surfing around this myriad of specialized websites.

So I came up with the simple idea of presenting my stuff as a singular stream of events, occurring over time. The first versions of the aggregation software was clumsy and hard to extend. It was unable to synchronize (only add new things) and the presentation was not very sexy. A few years later I blew off the dust from the idea and began from scratch. The result was what is now running on hunch.se.

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Yes, this is my new blog. I don’t know how many times I’ve started and came almost the whole way before giving up. Well, this weekend just did it for me. I know some of you might have expected a Smisk-based application, but unfortunately I broke the damn thing and so gave Wordpress 2.5 a shot.

Now it’s time for sleep!

I’ve added iphone to the list of output formats available from Stuff. Features progressive list loading and iPhone-ish look-and-feel.

Just enter Stuff with your iPhone and it will give you the appropriate format. You can also use this link, which forces the iphone format.