For a long time, I've been excited about the idea of creating browsable interfaces that convey information about the similarity of items using their relative proximity (who wouldn't be excited about that?). In 2006, I created JSViz and a whole bunch of demos to explore the space. A major point of frustration was JavaScript and DOM performance, especially while scaling the number of items or edges in a graph. JavaScript->DOM interaction has greatly improved in the latest generation of browsers, so a few weeks ago I set out to turn an old demo into a useful application:


ViewRu is an interactive music browser and player. It uses artist relationships from open APIs and music streams from YouTube to provide a single interface for exploring and listening to music. Presently, it takes advantage of browser features and performance only available in Google Chrome 4.

Check it out at www.viewru.com and let me know what you think.

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