Vancouver's Picostorm Code Labs unveils Flozaic, a 'social mosaic'
Vancouver-based Picostorm Code Labs has unveiled its latest project.
Flozaic is a "social mosaic" that combines geolocation, social networking, content aggregration, and a relevancy engine to create "an immersive, real-time information hub that connects you with your friends, peers, businesses and topical interests."
With Floziac, you can creare up to eight personas and choose from four types of identities.
• Personal - Your Facebook / G+ type identity. Flozaic has no “real legal name” stipulation and you can call yourself anything you want - after all, it’s your life - unless you want a verified account in which case sending some form legal ID will add a ‘verified’ flag to your account. Personal personas are limited to one.
• Professional - Your workplace, professional or business self. We recognize that a lot of people have at least 1 or 2 different professional personas, so like Academic and Internet/Alias identity, there’s no limit on professional accounts.
• Academic - The schooling or trades-learning aspects of your life.
• Netizen - Your blogging personas, gaming names, community handles etc. Typically useful for anything you’d want to have some kind of psuedonymity.
Floziac is "about choice," Picostorm says, one that reflects the "real and legitimate separations people have in their life." The service insists that it does things very differently from existing social networks. And here are plenty of things to use it for:
• Local Community Chat - Create a group chat, set the distance in G-Lo. Now you can see what people are up to in your apartment building, chat to people at the same beach as you. Alternatively, you could join somebody else’s group chat and chat to the people already there!
• Questions/Q&A - What was that bang outside? Does anyone know when the elevator in this building is going to be fixed? Where’s the best place nearby to get cocktails on a Monday morning? Ask the people around you. Not only does this empower locals and your community, but it can also allow you to interact when you are travelling for fun or abroad on business.
•Local Media - News and social content within a geographic boundary (be it 50 meters or 50km). Because sometimes you just want to read the local paper for a fluff piece on kittens being saved from trees, or the latest local political scandal.
• G-Lo MarketPlace - Imagine craigslist with accurate geolocation based search, and then combine it with the reputation system of eBay. If you’re buying a new mattress or sofa, you probably don’t want to travel 30 minutes to get it if there’s a similar one in your building. This is in the pipeline.
• Events - It’s nice to know where an event is before you get there. Similarly, it’s nice to know who’s there and who’s on their way.
• Location Awareness for friends - the idea of being able to see where your friends are is an old one, but one that has never been implemented successfully. Flozaic’s simple privacy system allows you to easily control who can see your location and when, making this finally a reality.
Picostorm calls Facebook's user interface "cookie-cutter" and similar social networks "unintuitive and clunky." The startup's new social mosaic aims to reinvent how social networks look with a unique user layout:
• Floating Dashboard - Flozaic’s trademark persistent interface, the all-singing, all-dancing, floating dashboard! The dashboard floats atop of the content and can be moved around on whim. From here you can do everything you’d want to - from posting updates, to uploading new media, even commenting. The dashboard is also context aware, and dynamically updating context menus allow you to interact with content from a single place.
• The Waterfall - Since the main content newsfeeds of Flozaic are controlled by the relevancy engine, there was a need to have a real-time social stream to quickly and accurately see what’s happening in your social sphere. The waterfall is also home to your notifications, messages and friend requests.
• Slide menus - Contacts, chats/currents/locations/etc, widgets and anything else that can be put into a list are displayed in a collapsible menu that slides out from the right side of the screen. It’s a good way to minimize clutter and maximize usability in a consistent and useful way.
• Chatbar - Flozaic’s chat system is affixed along the bottom of the site. A key feature that is immediately noteworthy is the widescreen chat format. We don’t think chat needs to be in tiny boxes. This is where you’ll find all your IMs and Group Chats.
Whilw Flozaic is brand new, Picostorm has tons of ideas for expansion—mobile apps, third-party API integration, social browsing, group search, and an in-depth business platform.
Picostorm headed to TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing this week to launch.
