The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Mob Art now Social Art, more social, way cooler, add this app already plz

Posted on November 27, 2007.

I have updated my latest experiment and dubbed it Social Art. It is still in the works but it is much closer to my dream of realizing my original goal of a social art app that prevents any one user from dominating the end result.

When I announced this app previously, it had a 10×10 canvas and users could edit anywhere on that canvas. I have since expanded the full canvas to 20×20 (four times the art) but I came up with an interesting way to encourage communal creativity; at any time, you can still only see 10×10 pixels from the canvas. I came up with a nice little method for picking what part of the canvas you can see on different days, so at any one time, you might be able to edit the top right corner and Joe might be able to edit the middle and Sarah might be able to edit the bottom left (assuming you have Southern friends).

What this means is that you can edit your own window into the full canvas all you want, but you will never own the whole canvas. At any time, the canvas will be the product of at least 4 users, usually more, hopefully many more. After you edit you can see the full canvas, and currently there's a 5 second lock time between edits, which will increase if the user base grows to any considerable number.

In the mean time, I'd love to see how these changes influence the images users create. Oh, and did I mention that there are multiple colors now? More are on the way, and eventually I will provide the option to upload the current image to your account. All in due time.

Check out Social Art here.

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