FotoViewer is a Flex based application that allows you to easily create 3D photo galleries of your photos stores on Flickr or SmugMug.
Its super easy to set one up - you simply pick the style for your photo gallery, then enter in your username for Flickr or Smugmug. The system connects to those photo sites and pulls down your albums or collections. Pick the one you want and you're done.
Here's one that I made of some photos I took in Ottawa a few weeks ago:

FotoViewr - Create your 3D photo gallery

There are a number of different templates that you can use to create the gallery. The one above is the "Wall" layout - they've got 6 in total - Flow, Horizon, Carousel, Floor and Pile are the others.
Once you've created the gallery, there's embed code for you to take an embed in your blog or social networking page, or a link that you can use to email them to your friends. Check it out - its a nicely done Flex app.

The blogosphere is all abuzz over Google's launch of Lively, an in browser virtual world, similar to Second Life.

However, the bigger news for RIA developers, and especially Flex developers, is the technology that they used to build it. From this Flickr screenshot, it appears as though Google is using Flex to develop the UI for Lively. This assumption is also supported by the minimum system requirements, which list Flash [Player] 9 or higher. (Flex applications can only run in Flash Player 9 or higher because of the new VM requirements.)

Since Lively only runs on Windows machines (and not in VMWare) I can't personally test this out - can anyone verify the Flickr screenshot?

Apparently this is 3D week for Flex applications. Earlier blog posts this week have focused on a 3D application for the Discovery Channel and Volkswagen. Today Yahoo joined the 3D group with a 3D Flex mashup of news information and a global map called NewsGlobe.

The 3D globe takes news items from Yahoo News and then maps the location of those news items onto a map of the world, allowing people to browse news by location, in a slick application.

Mashable is saying that this is Yahoo's response to Google Maps mashups. An interesting thought - it would be cool if Yahoo allows anyone to mashup their geo-encoded data with this application.

More on Yahoo Next and Mashable. Via Computer World.

The Discovery Channel is at it again with another compelling application built by the extremely talented team at EffectiveUI. This one is a 3-d application called Earth Live that allows visitors to interact with a 3-d model of earth and scientific data.

Users can "mashup" the scientific data and add them in layers onto the earth model, watching how storms are forming, ocean temperatures are changing and a whole lot more. You really have to experience the application to understand what I'm trying to describe here.

There are also featured stories in the application, allowing you to go back in time and see how disasters like Hurricane Katrina formed, or how the Gulf Stream affects weather in Europe.

More information is available at Computer World.

From Digg on the weekend. Someone has created a very cool 3D version of Digg using Flash and Digg's RSS feed.

Another great example on how to use Flash to display information in a unique way.