Instopix (Instant Messenger Topic Pictures) is a program, currently only for MSN users, that shows related pictures for their conversations. It’s an early alpha by 21-year-old Luke Stanley who has spun it out of his startup ThoughtTrail. What Instopix does is pretty cool.
While you are having an IM conversation with a fiend on MSN Messenger, if your contact talks about something like a film, the Instopix plugin will bring up information about the film with links, even video. Here’s a demo.
The program is a part of a viral strategy for ThoughtTrail, a Semantic Desktop and Semantic Web platform. ThoughtTrail is a reusable libary with functions like the ability to quickly do phrase-finding and web searches, achieved with a plugin. The main code is cross-platform, Python coded.
So, Stanley – who calls his project a “flirtation with Visual Language” – thinks he could have a shot at Mike Arrington’s email problem, such as a creating a Firefox plugin to get all his unread Gmail messages and import them to ThoughtTrail to provide visual cues, summarisation and cross-referencing to see if he already knows an emailer on Facebook or LinkedIn. I don’t know if it would work, but it sounds plausible enough.
The next version of Instopix (not yet released), has microblogging straight from conversations: as in, tell a friend something, then “send to blog”.
I would find it hard to think of anything more annoying
So if you’re having a innocent conversation about terrorism do you get a pic of Bin Laden or a knock at the door from the FBI? This plugin has some interesting privacy issues.
@Flotsam by installing this I guess you are pretty much agreeing that anything in your IM conversations can be processed by the plugin, so I don’t really see the privacy issue.
Of course, users installing it, install it because they *WANT* to see related pictures.
Not only that but MSN is an unencrypted protocol. If you went to a busy campus, and ran Wireshark, you could do worse.
Actually at present, we don’t even SEE the users messages anywhere at our servers, and the sourcecode comes with the download right now, so it’s pretty transparent what we do.
Generally it’s funny and not annoying, sometimes even *usefull*.
Especially if you can’t remember the name of some musician your friend is talking about. It really helps jog the memory.
It’s even more usefull if you are learning languages. Seeing images of concepts you haven’t fully learnt the word for, could accelerate language learning.
The objective is to provide a compelling exploration of what the users are Instant Messaging about. We aren’t at this stage yet. For example: if I said I had my keyboard broken on my laptop, it’s unlikely it’d show a picture of a laptop with a broken keyboard, but if i wanted to blog about this, this is exactly the picture I need to represent this with Visual Language. Our phrase finding needs improving, with concept relatedness adding, but it’s all very do-able.
We just released blogging from IM conversations. We have a new download up on the site, no screenshots up yet though!
I should add, we ARE looking for investment.
Good job Luke!