Cooliris, the startup that allows users to explore sites like YouTube and Google Images through a "fullscreen 3D" wall of media, continues to add features to its browser plugin, making it less a cool novelty and more a genuinely useful way to surf the web. The most important of the just-released additions is a "quick and easy" tool for enabling Cooliris on your website.
I'm already a fan, because the plugin (now also called Cooliris -- it was previously dubbed PicLens, which was a little confusing) makes it easy and fun to fly around a large collection of images or videos. But until now, it only worked on a relatively limited number of sites, mostly big media-sharing and media-searching sites like Facebook and Flickr. There are plenty of other sites with galleries of images or other media that were basically left out of the picture -- technically, Cooliris could already be enabled on any site with media RSS, but the company says the process took "hours" and required some heavy-lifting from Cooliris' tech support.
Now that time has shrunk to minutes, and the process is ridiculously easy. You just give Cooliris the URL of your site's galleries, then after a few tests you get some XML and links to add to your site, and that's it -- with just a click, visitors can explore your galleries in Cooliris. This could potentially take Cooliris well beyond the "hundreds" of sites that have already become Cooliris-enabled. Brett Gardner, who just joined Cooliris to oversee its user growth, says the company only recently developed a real strategy for site outreach, and that should push things forward, too.
Another limitation was the fact that when you found something interesting in Cooliris, it could be a pain to share it with your friends -- you'd have to jump out of the Cooliris browser to the site where the media originated, then open your email and send the link to your friend. Now Cooliris has created a "share" feature that allows you to just drag media into a box, then send it off (see screenshot above). Right now, the feature is limited to email, but it would also be useful to share on social sites like Facebook and FriendFeed -- in fact, Gardner says Cooliris has a Facebook-related announcement coming soon.
The last new feature is the addition of several international sources to Cooliris Discover, its tool for "channel-surfing" different news sources on the web. The added sources include French newspaper Le Monde, British newspapers the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent, plus several others.
I'm hoping to see a big increase in Cooliris-supported websites in the next few months. I'm also waiting for more detail on how the Palo Alto, Calif. company plans to make money. When YouTube's head of monetization Shashi Seth joined Cooliris as its chief revenue officer in June, he outlined some possible business strategies, but it doesn't look like any of them have been put into action yet. Sure, it's still relatively early days, but that Kleiner Perkins money can't last forever.