Microsoft Zoom.it (Bitly for Hi-res images)

This is very interesting from a technical perspective. Its all being done with js and xhr requests. Its powered by Seadragon( <a href="http://seadragon.com/developer/" rel="nofollow">http://seadragon.com/developer/</a> ) and apparently Zoom.it is just a new rename.

Seadragon was created by Blaise Aguera y Arcas.<p>He works at Microsoft and has done some pretty cool stuff.<p>His TED talks: <a href="http://www.ted.com/speakers/blaise_aguera_y_arcas.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/speakers/blaise_aguera_y_arcas.html</a>

I've had an idea for an image/bit.ly service for a while ... it goes something like this:<p>- You upload a high/low res image<p>- You have to specify one of the creative commons or other standard licenses<p>- There's a short URL, API, geo-tagging, and sharing/embedding options<p>- Attribution is stamped on the image and included in the embed code<p>The idea is that journalists/citizen-journalists (and possibly artists/creatives) can share work and include much more explicit usage/attribution rules. News wires have access to a constant feed of good images.<p>Thoughts?

As it turns out, there are already a couple of sites similar to zoom.it [1]. However, it should be interesting to see if zoom.it gains substantial traction, and how. I suspect that the fact it's Microsoft releasing something lightweight and useful will make this an interesting news story. This is seeming to be confirmed by Twitter showing a steady stream of links to it, and its gaining a lot of buzz on social media sites.<p>But, we'll see. It's possible that there just isn't enough demand for this type of thing, yet.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it" rel="nofollow">http://www.moreofit.com/similar-to/zoom.it</a>

This is great! It reminds me of Zoomworld, described by Jef Raskin in his book <i>The Humane Interface</i>, and even the Demo picture on the front page demonstrates some of those ideas.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-Interactive/dp/0201379376" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Humane-Interface-Directions-Designing-...</a>

Look Microsoft, you <i>can</i> create useful dynamic web services without requiring Flash, I mean Silverlight.

Independent of the product's merits; it's fascinating to see a large corporation experiment with the concept of "MVP".

This is pretty cool. I designed something similar for my previous employer that took a very large image of a map and scaled it and sliced it into squares. The resulting images were then used as a custom map with the Google Maps API.<p><a href="http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2/overlays.html#CustomMapTiles" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/v2...</a>

Thats pretty cool. First one to come up with a site that shows a bunch of examples wins a bunch of easy traffic.

Unicode: <a href="http://zoom.it/zTem#full" rel="nofollow">http://zoom.it/zTem#full</a>

I don't see any embed link. That would be great.

Pretty neat, I'm glad they didn't use silverlight<p>Here's mine: <a href="http://zoom.it/ERnN#full" rel="nofollow">http://zoom.it/ERnN#full</a>

Not Silverlight based, appears to be all Javascript. That's interesting coming from MS themselves.

I wish you could annotate in there.

The artificial inertia is pretty annoying. Have these guys ever used an iPhone in their lives?