Just another quick idea that crossed my mind for using Silverlight DeepZoom. Basically build a simple web service that allowed people to submit images from multiple sources – through the website itself, from their camera, from their phone, hook into their Flickr / Fhotobucket / Facebook etc account, FireFox extension / IE8 Accelerator which allowed you to “add to my DeepZoom”.
These images would then be assembled into one ever expanding DeepZoom image, with some sort of algorithm for position and size based on recentness and attention data recorded from people viewing the application. Perhaps even allow filtering based on day / month / year / location (for geotagged images), things like that and dynamically filter then rearrange the images much like the superb Hard Rock Memorabilia site.
This could then be offered as a Url, an embed code for putting on other pages, a Facebook / OpenSocial application etc.
Not sure I can see a massive path to monetization – might be able to license the application to photo sites like Flickr, SmugMug, Zoomr etc as a value add for their users. Advertising rates for Facebook / Social Network applications must be taking a pounding along with everything else I’d think.
Actually saying that, something like this might make an excellent tool on the various stock photography websites – ShutterStock, SnapVillage, iStockPhoto, Getty etc. So maybe a path to monetization would be to get some attention and traction through the free consumer version and try to punt a “pro” version to this kind of client.
Storage costs for the consumer version might kill you (DeepZoom images result in about 140% larger image size, and you’d have to store them yourself) but then again, Amazon S3 just announced volume discounts.
Still, it would be a fun project and there is some utility in the DeepZoomLifeStreamInfiniteImageQuilt (working title!). The idea sort of reminds me of the old “one photo a day” pieces a few people have published:
http://www.c71123.com/daily_photo/
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6B26asyGKDo