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Flowgram – screencasting on steroids…

Flowgram

Flowgram is an online multimedia screencasting application which has just launched in private beta. It’s ambitious and looks very interesting in a number of ways. For one it has a fully interactive interface, which means that you can click on videos, links and things like documents and not lose your place in the screencast, just hit the backspace key!

Flowgram3

The process of creating a flowgram as they’re called is fairly simple, just enter in the URL of the page you want to grab and then you can start editing it by selecting the thumbnail that appears in the timeline. At this point you can add voiceover, text notes, delete or shuffle the order of pages as the project grows. To be honest the interface is not that great, the nav elements are spread all over the screen, which makes it fairly unintuitive to add new stuff like photos and stuff, and I still haven’t worked out how to embed a single video box into a page. [update – oh look, they’ve stuck an ‘Add Custom Page’ menu option hidden way over under the top left logo – how totally naff].

Flowgram5

Nevertheless it’s a nice idea and will definitely have some use in various scenarios, for instance complex research walkthroughs or other areas where you need to bring together a bunch of disparate web content in one place. The interface definitely needs tidying up though if they want to attract the non-tech user, and they’ll need to improve the embedding functionality, it’s still a little awkward to embed a flowgram into something like this post (I could only find a way to embed it into a WordPress.com page).

All in all? Interesting, but not really primetime ready, and certainly way too clumsy right now to replace a simple screencast tool like screencastomatic.com and some screengrabs for most people. I’ve got 10 invites for those super keen to take a look.

 FlowGrams are a kind of Show-and-Tell. FlowGrams allow you to combine information from multiple webpages and to share this information with anyone by literally taking them through it! FlowGrams Pages are recorded with Voice, Highlights and Text Notes. Once a FlowGram is made anyone can play it by just clicking on a link!

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