The screenshot above does not do justice to the visual experience. PicLens is hands down the best I have ever seen photos look online.

PicLens is an add on for Firefox users. You can go get it here. When you add PicLens to your Firefox experience, photos on many internet sites (including Flickr and Zooomr) have a little play type triangular icon over them. When you click on this icon it transforms your viewing experience and takes photos to a brand new level. Only photos are loaded on the screen and you can move your mouse to scroll through the photos or enlarge or shrink photos in your viewing experience.

With PicLens photos float through your browser like beauty flowing from a waterfall. The motion effects are outstanding. Best of all though, PicLens allows you to see photos in the true splendor that they are best seen in. Large. One of the problems with viewing many photos large on the internet is that you have to click and wait for a new page to load. This gets boring and tiresome. Not with PicLens though. Simply move your mouse scroll button up or down and photos get larger and smaller.

As amazing as PicLens is for browsing photos on the web I do wish that they improve one thing.

Right now interacting with photos on PicLens is very difficult. While you can click through to any photo to fave/comment/bookmark/etc., when you do this PicLens ends abruptly. After you interact with the photo there is no easy way to get back to the PicLens page where you were browsing before you clicked out of your PicLens experience.

What would most easily fix this would be if PicLens allowed you to ctl-click (on a PC) or cmd-click (on a Mac) and have that photo’s page load in Firefox in the background. This way you could browse someone’s entire stream, favorites, etc. in PicLens, all the while cmd-clicking (in my case) as you go to go back and interact with the photos that you liked best once you were done.

Alternatively, TranceMist suggests that people simply could be allowed to fave/comment on a photo from within PicLens.

Looking at photos on PicLens is like seeing them in a fine art gallery or museum. Photos take on a whole new beauty. But more interactive features are still needed.

More on PicLens from Read/Write Web and Webware.

Comments

What I like about the Seesmic’s acquisition of Twhirl isn’t that I’m using it as my default client for Twitter.   Or that I happen to use Seesmic and look forward to some chocolate and peanut butter goodness.

I thought last year was the year of offline apps.  And it was, of platforms.  The rise of AIM was a case in point, but it still needed a kller app.  It might still, and when Eugene Lee first mentioned Twhirl to me I didn’t take too much note of it beyond  richer clone of Twitterific.  Later adopted it and you learn about social tools by playing with them.

The thing is we will see more special purpose browser clients that leverage the opaque flows of APIs.  We’ve all expected it, but now we see them enriching the desktop.  Look at PicLens.  Just look and look and look how it augments, for now, the browser experience.  Expect that Tim Berners Lee expected an editor, not a browser.  And then with varying media and microcontent, the possibilities are even more diverse than what you expect now.

In the enterprise, of course, this has to get past the standard desktop model that is administered.  Individual choice will still thrive within he standard browser.  But experimentation of a richer, more persistent and connected web will happen.  As we reverberate between centralization and decentralization, with darlings like FriendFeed feeding upon a small ebb of fragmentation, the timing is right for things that bring our disparate activity together for us in new ways (not that Lifetreaming is new, its the pattern and time in which solutions are brought to bear for them).

The Seesmic thing makes sense on a number of levels beyond the trend line.  It starts with how a flash vdeo client plays well with AIM.  And the need to hook into the command line of an emerging web (and for twitter and others it becomes interesting if clients that subsume attention subsume more).  Just follow the attention and gestures that mean something (Steve Gilmore, where art thou?).

None of this is ready for mainstream (consumer, already made the other point).  But, I, for one, welcome our new atomized client underlords.  The underweb, today, fits those who do more than browse in their pajamas.  And if you think more than that — too much information.

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