This is episode number 864 where in looking for one thing on the internet I end up falling into something else. In writing up a future UdG Agora Daily Try I was looking for a metaphor image to represent the idea of “random” and found this image:
flickr photo shared by fo.ol under a Creative Commons ( BY-SA ) license
Way down in the caption of the photo it said “made with meemoo.org” (not even linked). Meemoo? What is that? And this I found something I am not quite sure I can even describe:
What I saw was something that reminded me of Yahoo Pipes (if not yet dead, it is being lowered into the web grave, thanks Yahoo for making another line for Another Web Bites The Dust).
So you have a set of modules of web things, like something that can capture an image from a web cam, or take input form a control panel, and more that perform transformations on media, and then are piped to some kind of output. Quite a few let you generate animated GIFs- that was the first one I played with (shown in the featured image).
That’s not all that revolutionary, there are a lot of web apps to do this. This was another one I just played that makes images like I found:
You fiddle with the various settings, press start, and it animates and draws on the canvas. Stop it, make some changes, and add more. It is generating all of this as JavaScript which you can peek at:
I am still now sure of how all the various modules work, but there are a lot of them
Meemoo describes itself as “a web-based creative tool maker”, “like Arduino for the web”, and “100% of the web”:
A Meemoo composition is a graph of modules and the wires that connect them. Modules are HTML pages that can live anywhere online, using any web technology. Wires represent how the modules send messages to each other.
Meemoo takes some inspiration from Quartz Composer, Reason, Pure Data and AudioTool. But Meemoo is 100% of the web. It will be a tool for creative collaboration, to tie together smaller web demos into more complex compositions. “View Source” taught me to program, and will be central to Meemoo.
Compositions will be sharable on a community site. All compositions and modules will be forkable in the open source spirit of creative collaboration.
One composition will allow web video to be remixed with modules familiar to people who create digital music: patterns and pattern sequencers. Another person might take the video player out of this composition, and replace it with a JavaScript AudioAPI synth. Another might add a music visualizer written in Processing.js.
I’m curious what someone else thinks about meemoo. But this is the kind of thing that reinforces that the web feels fine and that it is way way bigger than what people who prognosticate its future really see.
As my Uncle Bob would say, “Well, I’ll be darned!”
As my sister Cheryl would say, “Strange is good.”
I myself say the beaches of the Internet are vast and the beachcombing can be weird and beautiful. I think you found one of those darned strange weird beautiful things!