Most people sooner or later come across an idea or a product and say: “Damn, I was thinking about something just like it!”. For quite some time now I have been thinking how web surfing could become more “visual” and “user friendly”, and when I came across the Swarm site I said: “OK looks like I am not alone”. (If you click the link wait some time on the site to see the dynamics going on).
The site basically tracks where people are navigating around the Internet and presents it under a nice, interlinked, Cosmo-like graphic interface. Right now the service is not THAT useful because it is not customizable and it lacks features. Nonetheless it represents a good idea and I think it has great potential if the developers manage to evolve it in the right direction.
There is also a search engine trying to explore the “visual” dimension of the web. It is called Kartoo and it displays the search results as web maps. Pages are interconnected and the size of the icon is proportional to the number of citations within that site.