At SXSW Interactive yesterday, I met Curtis Spencer (@cruxlux) in the hall between panels. We sat down and spoke for a few minutes and he told me about an application he was developing called Cruxlux. The name describes what the application attempts to do: Lux for light and Crux for the decisive point. In essence, the goal of Cruxlux is to analyze the web page you are visiting, and scour other web sources for related stuff, then present that information to you, summarized, and without actually leaving the current page. Although technically in beta, it is available to use without registration.
Here’s how Cruxlux works. It can either be launched from a bookmarklet from within the browser, or if the web page is set up correctly, from a link on the page itself. When invoked, it opens a window over the current page, and contextual links and information start being populated. The more types of information on the page, the more links and stories are mentioned in this popup. However, the links within Cruxlux are not simple redirects to outside web pages. In fact, clicking on most links will actually give you more information right inside the popup, which means you won’t be accidentally redirected away from the page you started on. And returning to that page is as easy as closing the Cruxlux window.
At this point, you can feel free to browse the information. We found lots of new related news sources and interesting byways to follow as we explored, but we must admit to a bit of confusion at times. The Cruxlux window is fairly busy and clicking certain items (like the topical slides the run along the top) cause different actions to happen. Also, once we clicked on a topic button, we weren’t sure how to return to the original set of results.
This is a relatively new app that is still in active development and we see a lot of potential with the way Cruxlux works. We are looking forward to how it evolves and grows in to its full potential.
