08
Oct
World Chill
I like the new take on the old Coca Cola jingle, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” which now starts “I’d like to teach the world to chill” performed by G. Love. It’s an ad for Coca-Cola Zero rather than regular Coke but without the visual you’d never know that.
In addition to that, the visual ad has a www.worldchill.com url that takes you to not the greatest Flash site, but I really like the idea behind it. You can select your own “chill” level and make a thumbtack where you are with your chill level. That in turn gets averaged by localities and regions up to the world level so you get a “chill level” for the entire world. The screen saver cycles through areas showing the chill level of that area.
The makers had the idea that you could have a map like weather maps that showed changes in “chill” over time and perhaps watch trends. It’s definitely not wide-spread or well implemented enough for that. The Flash that lets you place your rating is tricky to use and doesn’t let you easily update your info. It should just be a simple applet, maybe a part of everyone’s instant messenger program. Just a slider that when changed sends the update. It has to be easy and always there.
The more minor problem is the screen saver. It starts at the top level and then steps down to a region and then to parts of the region. When a part is done it has to go back to the region level before going to another part so you end up seeing regions a lot. I understand that it is following it’s internal tree representation of the data but it can skip those things it has been to before pretty easily.