Image aggregator prototype

The other night, on the way home, an idea came to me…so I pulled up my development environment and decided to write some code.  I think my terrified development team is probably locking me out of the source control systems as we speak… ;-)

My thought was this.  I’m a visual person, and a lot of the feeds I subscribe to have images in the posts.  If I could see all of those images together, I could make some quick decisions about what I want to read now, vs. what I will read later.  And thus was born the image aggregator.

Take a look for yourself - click here, and use your NewsGator Online username/password.

If you’re one of those types who is completely caught up with all of your unread feeds, you won’t see anything.  But if you have unread stuff, you’ll see a compilation of all of the images in your unread posts.  If you click on one, that post will get marked as read in NG/Online, and you’ll get linked out to the post.

Here’s an example of what I see for my own account (click for larger version):

It lets me get an idea, at a glance, of what’s available to read.

This is obviously an EARLY prototype of something, which may or may not see the light of day…but I think it’s an interesting concept.  Any thoughts from you about it?  Useful or no?

Aside: this was all written using the public NewsGator Online API.