Well, if you’re a frequent flyer here you probably know that until recently I had been working at Flektor (a startup created by the founders of Naughty Dog) making pretty cutting-edge Flash-based online mashup/video-editing technology and widgets.
The company was acquired by Fox Interactive Media in 2007, made a part of Myspace in 2008 and (for reasons beyond the scope of this post) subsequently shut down in 2009.
During my time at Flektor I must have made well over a hundred visual-effect driven slideshows, photoalbums, effects, transitions, polls, postcards and other widgets and small apps for the Flektor platform and editor as well as conversions of these plus additional ones for Myspace, Photobucket and TinyFx.
My favorites have always been the ones with some sort of wacky creative twist or interesting technical aspect to them. Since the site and the original Flektor-player embeds stopped working – on this site or anywhere else – I had to remove older posts containing these live widgets, and instead I put together a short video from whatever small amount of captured material I had of the ones I have done:
In addition here’s another video which showcases some of the features of the Flektor Full Editor. It’s rather incomplete and doesn’t really do justice to the real thing – which I believe was way ahead of its time – but at the same time it preserves at least some record of it. Remember, everything here happens online, real time, in the browser-window:
There you have it.
A little bit of a potential silver lining is that – unless it gets derailed somewhere – a set of really cool slideshows featuring a vastly improved version of the slideshow-technology we had developed just before the shutdown is supposed to be released by Myspace in the near future.
I wouldn’t hold my breath though. 😉
