Yahoo may be busy fighting off Microsoft, but that doesn't mean there isn't time for some new mashups. The latest effort from Yahoo is a 3-D news/mapping mashup that allows you to follow the day's stories as they happen across the globe.
The Yahoo NewsGlobe mashup combines Yahoo News RSS feeds with a Flash-based 3-D globe that allows you to either watch or interactively browse through the news. The application is written entirely in Flash, which means it can be run as a standalone news browser if you've got Adobe's AIR installed.
There are two ways to use the new mashup, the default option which automatically cycles through the latest stories, rotating the globe as it goes, or the interactive mode which allows you to spin the globe around looking for the red markers denoting stories. The size of the markers indicate the prominence of a story, the taller the marker the more widely reported the story.
Clicking one of the markers will bring up a brief synopsis with links to the news source.
The 3-D interface is impressive and reportedly takes advantage of Papervision3D, an open source 3-D library for ActionScript.
While we generally love all things involving maps, Yahoo NewsGlobe fails to inspire much enthusiasm beyond the whiz-bang 3-D aspect. The actual functionality of the interface is somewhat limited. There's no way to zoom in on the globe — interaction consists of rotating the globe with your mouse.
Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm stems from the fact that, in course of writing about the blogging/Google Maps mashup the other day, Tony Hirst whipped up something that does more or less the same thing as Yahoo's NewsGlobe, but took only a matter of minutes to create. You can see the results here. Hirst's Pipes mashup doesn't auto-refresh and it lacks the 3-D element, but functionality wise it does the same thing and doesn't require Flash.
Given that NewsGlobe seems to be more of a proof-of-concept than finished product, perhaps I'm being to hard on it, but once the 3-D element wears off, what's left doesn't stand out from the dozens of other similar mashups already out there. Luckily this is part of Yahoo's open source effort so there's a good chance that someone will improve on NewsGlobe's starting point.
[via ComputerWorld]
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