We’ve finally launched the interactive version of our popular poster. Webtrendmap.com turned out to not just be the base for our next year’s poster, it is a new way to find high quality content.

iA’s newest product helps you finding the hottest links in the last 24 hours Unlike the common link aggregators like Digg or Reddit, Webtrendmap.com doesn’t rely on the so called ‘wisdom of the masses.’ It relies on the individual care of people you trust: in other words curation — curation by authorities in their field, not random curation.

How it Works: Using Twitter as a Protocol

Twitter is an excellent filter to find new content, because everything you get is filtered by whom you deem trustworthy (we call this act of filtering micro curation). The problem with twitter and links is that you miss a lot of good stuff when you go to sleep. The stream of data keeps on flowing, and if you follow more than 150 people you can’t keep track of everything. Occasionally, you also may miss great content if the tweet describing the link is worded badly — not all of your friends are great headline writers.

Twitter tries to solve this with their own trend watch. Unfortunately, Twitter trends are often too general and targeted for spamming. Enter webtrendmap.com:

Webtrendmap.com visually organizes your friends links into groups and ranks them by popularity. Each Webtrendmap.com user chooses the friends that they deem most relevant link sources and visually organizes them on a map. Links that are popular throughout different maps make it to the top page.

Who Pays? Buy a Poster, Get an Account

Only people that buy the poster get an account. This way we make sure that only engaged users, no spammers, no trolls, no anonymous jerks add information to the system.

If you don’t like the map: give it to someone else. If you don’t like the app, enjoy the poster. If you don’t like either: fair enough.

Everybody that bought a Web Trend Map 4 poster got a free access code in their inbox. Check the spam folder if you don’t see it. If you changed your email address, send us a mail (feedback@webtrendmap.com) and we’ll resend you the code to the new address.

Why we Did it: Looking Ahead

In January (2009), it was clear to us that Twitter was about to become the most efficient micro-publishing link machine. Far better and easier to use than any ‘micro blogging’ platform. By the time this year’s poster was complete, we also sensed that next year’s map needed to be about people, not domains. The web developed from a network of shared machines (Web 1.0) to a network of shared documents (Web 2.0) to a network of identities (name is still taboo).

How we did it

When I told Craig Mod about the original idea (using visual maps to organize links posted on twitter) back in February he was fire and flames. All we needed was cash to support the project (three people worked on it full time for four months). By June that cash was in the bank due to the good Web Trend Map poster sales. This is how we announced our plans:

Building the Web Trend Map was a race against time. Around July, Twitter link lists, Twitter leader boards and Twitter Favorite sites started to pop up like mushrooms. The first version of webtrendmap.com, published as a private beta, June 14th was black and buggy as hell. One person described it as “Osama Bin-Laden’s Cave Dashboard.” With the help of 250 beta testers, we moved forward step by step, improving the scope of the project, the interface and the underlying algorithms.

What we plan to do

There is still a lot of work to be done. If we sell enough accounts to support further development, we’ll continue to forge forward at our current speed. It works pretty well, but as with every v1.0, it’s still wet behind the ears.

The long term plan is to use the data that we collect to build a Web Trend Book. We now have several city maps, thematic maps and vectorial maps. We plan to add a lot more and eventually collect enough data to publish a Web Trend Map Atlas along with the map next year.

We’re very excited about having Craig as on the project, setting up shop at the iA office for the time being. Without his broad experience in programming, typography, web design and his tremendous motivation, webtrendmap.com would not be where it is and couldn’t move where it moves. We are also looking forward to working with him on publishing the Web Trend Map book together (which is something he is good at as well).

Send in your Own Designs

If you want to, you can help us create your own map designs (additional cities, additional boards) and send them to feedback@webtrendmap.com. No guarantee that we publish them, but if we like them, we will. Here is the editable Fireworks template (right click to download).

Enough said. Check it out.

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