What's it do?
Flywheel is a hybrid of Shiny Metal Assets' ajarr™ personal portal and TalkPoint Communications' streaming media product line. It is, at its heart, a feed aggregator. Feeds are rendered in mini-windows called "Cogs," and Cogs are organized by user-created tabs. Individual Cogs can be copied onto users' own sites with a simple snippet of JavaScript code. It is designed with a few goals in mind:
- Offer a media-rich experience. Play audio and video (via podcasts and enclosures).
- Make an application, not a web site. Flywheel is a web-based application—it is not meant to be seen as a web site. Users have years of experience with application interfaces; why should a site create a learning curve for a new interface? Work the way applications do.
- Make it easy to create "remote" Cogs—allow users to copy Cogs from portals onto their own pages with just a couple mouse-clicks.
- Make everything modifiable without cluttering the interface.
- Make it simple to consolidate multiple media sources in one interface and to re-syndicate from one portal.
