Salesforce

Today, Salesforce.com also announced that it has created a number of tools that will make using the Visualization API easier for Salesforce's own customers and developers. These tools include code snippets and API harnesses and will allow Salesforce customers to create custom reporting and analysis applications for Salesforce's CRM solution or on top of Saleforce's newly announced Force.com platform.

Reporting in the Cloud

As Google points out, more and more companies are storing their data in the cloud, so being able to visualize this data and creating good reporting tools is becoming increasingly important. Creating these reports in the cloud as well seems like a logical step, and we expect that quite a few new applications will be created on top of the Visualization API.

Here is Anton's comment, followed by a video of his app.

"Our screensaver is a visualization of the real time web... more precise a visualization over the blogosphere, real time, as a world globe.

Read more about it here, and look at the Youtube-movie:
http://www.twingly.com/ScreenSaver.aspx

I think it's worth to mentioning!"

NewTeeVee says it's more fun than Digg Swarm but I think it's less useful and actually a bit nauseating to watch. (Update: By the end of the day, it's actually much improved.)

Here's a quick screenshot of recommended videos based on the Zombies in Plain English video linked to above. An interesting algorithm, is it not?

My Take on This Tool

There's a couple of things that I think are notable here.

First, the videos are different than the "related videos" in the sidebar of the YouTube page. Second, this visualization is really half-baked. What's the biggest take-away for me here, though? Recommendation and visualization are going to be major issues in the near-term future. In a world of information overload - effective systems of visualization will be small gold-mines and effective recommendation engines will be very large gold mines. That's why the company that made the "Plain English" videos, Common Craft, got hired to do product intro videos for Google - because visual explanation is a rare skill with big payoffs. That's also why it's not at all crazy that recommendation engine MyStrands has now raised more than $55 million. Recommendation and visualization are going to be key challenges for the future. More than just a neat little experiment, today's YouTube visualization is a peak into the future. The fact that they released something so half-baked into the wild just goes to show that visualizing recommendations is easier said than done.

Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.

To illustrate how this works, Yahoo has created an interactive data visualization that shows visitor traffic data in nearly real time. Using it, one can drill down into specific age groups, genders and story types to see what people's aggregate reading habits look like.

You can view and play with the data visualization here. They even designed the UI in HTML5 rather than Flash so you can check it out on your iPad.

The information was released in three forms, the "Diary Dig," the "Warlogs" and bittorrent download in CSV and SQL formats.

An interesting element of last July's Wikileaks release of Afghani war documents was the use of data visualization by independent parties to make the vast amount of data apprehensible.

With the data so new, the only visualization that has been done so far has been by one the news organizations that Wikileaks gave the database to prior to public release, the Guardian. The graphic is titled "Wikileaks Iraq war logs: every death mapped."

It's worth a look, though it is also important to look at the follow-up piece to this map, "Wikileaks Iraq: what's wrong with the data?" (Hint: it provides an incomplete, therefore possibly misleading picture of the war.)

If you know of, or have done, additional data visualization on this material, please let us know, either in the comments or via email. We would like to keep covering that aspect of the data and how it's used.

Wikimedia's data analyst Erik Zachte has just unveiled a new visualization that shows exactly where in the world these edits are occurring on any given day for the various language editions of Wikipedia.

The visualization is interactive and using various keyboard shortcuts, you can navigate between different views and event markers. You can zoom into a particular area (with the + key), for example, or filter the edits by language (with the space bar).

There are three types of visualizations available with this new tool: an animation of edits, a bubble map, and a heat map - all highlighting the 400,000 some odd edits that occur in a given day.

The tool reveals some interesting trends, not surprisingly showing different language versions more active depending on the time-zones. It also demonstrates that most edits to the Chinese-language Wikipedia come from outside mainland China.

Zachte has written a blog post explaining how he created the visualization tool using HTML5 and JavaScript.

LinkedIn showed off a new addition to its Lab site today called the LinkedIn Connection Timeline. It's a very fun way to remember people you used to work with throughout the years - and see where they are now. Built internally by LinkedIn's Gordon Koo, the visualization does a good job illustrating the tip of the iceberg of what structured, social data can provide when accessed programmatically.

And it's fun. It brings to mind the app Memolane and makes me wish someone would build something like this for Twitter or Facebook. Take the list of people I'm connected to there and show me when on a timeline I connected with the ones I have interacted with the most. Play me a song that my Last.fm profile says I used to listen to a lot, don't listen to anymore and that has a high-emotion rhythm to it and you've got a mashup that could bring lots of people near tears. (You just know that Facebook will offer something like this someday.) Always more emotionally reserved, LinkedIn at least offers a fun retrospective of past co-workers.

It's like a tree of information, with the branches flowing and merging as users move from page to page, action to action. Wojcicki and Phil Mui from the Analytics team also demonstrated real-time analytics, announced last month, along with a premium version of the product. Google also announced nine more languages for Analytics today.

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half."
- John Wanamaker

Google took inspiration from Charles Joseph Minard's 1869 graph of Napoleon's campaign in Russia:

"It shows time, it shows motion, and it tells a story," Wojcicki said. "But I can't drill down. It's static. I can't make it dynamic." To make this kind of visualization useful for Google Analytics, it has to have adjustable filters. "What happened to the people who had horses? What happened to the people who spoke Russian?" Flow Visualization lets site owners drill down to Australian visitors or IE 7 users that way.

Google took inspiration from the 19th century chart and made it dynamic. The new Flow Visualization shows the march of users across a site, but it can be sorted to look at specific kinds of users. Web administrators can compare users on different browsers or systems, or from different referrers or countries, to see how their experiences differ on the site.

These new features provide a new way to use the goals administrators can set with Google Analytics. The Flow Visualization will show which users reached site goals and which ones didn't. Read more about these new ways of reporting analytics on the Google Analytics blog.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch day 3 live here.

Thanks to Nathan Yau, author of the great blog Flowing Data, for posting this video in the first place we saw it.

See also Rosling's widely acclaimed TED Talk video and Emily Cunningham's in-depth review of Gapminder's DIY data desktop data visualization tool here at ReadWriteWeb from August.

I think this video also points to arguments similar to those I make in favor of aggregate social web user data being made available for programmatic access and analysis: data about our world offers new opportunities to unearth injustices, shine light on opportunities and gain a new level of social self-awareness. Let's set that data free!

Essentially Many Eyes is a mashup machine for visualizing data! A tour of the site is offered here. Users can upload their own datasets, and/or work with existing datasets on the site.

There are a lot of great options to visualize the datasets, as outlined on this page. As an example, check out this visualization of McDonalds calories data:

As the headline for this graph notes, eating large fries gives you more calories than a Big Mac. In the above example, you can select other data types on the left (Total Fat, Saturated Fat, etc) and the graph changes. Also you can re-size the graphs easily. The actual visualization rendering in the browser is done using Java.

Conversations (i.e. comments) are encouraged on the site, to help make sense of the data. So given enough interest, there's sure to be some "collective intelligence" happening on Many Eyes over time. As far as the above graph goes, right now the only comment is: "I guess the best thing to order is the plain hamburger with small fries. You'll get an authentic McD's experience and not die." Which is actually pretty useful advice :-)

Tim O'Reilly also posted on this, including this great comment from one of the developers Martin Wattenberg: "In Many Eyes our goal is to "democratize" visualization by offering it as a simple service." Fernanda Viegas is the other developer.

Many Eyes is available as a service on IBM's alphaWorks Services website, so it is still an "alpha" app. But even now I can see Many Eyes having many uses, across both business and consumer applications. I'm generally excited about the richer forms of content delivery and manipulation we're seeing on the Web these days, so Many Eyes is a promising service.

Harrison created a series of ring graphics showing all stories, as well as breaking them down by month and day (above). He also made rings using the entire set of Digg historical data going back to December 1, 2004. I won't try to guess what trends one might be able to identify from looking at the Digg Rings (though the above graphic seems to indicate more site volume on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday), but the results are simply gorgeous. Certainly one of the coolest Digg visualizations we've seen. You can download full PDFs of the rings at Harrison's site. ]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visualizing_digg_tree_rings.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/visualizing_digg_tree_rings.php Visualization Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0800 Josh Catone VisualComplexity.com is a site that intends to be a unified resource space for the visualization of complex networks. Their main goal is to better understand the different types of visualization methods used across several different disciplines, including social networks and the World Wide Web. Although this site is not new, with all the discussion around the idea of a "social graph," it's a good time to revisit what VisualComplexity has to offer. With the social graph, we're attempting to map everyone to everyone and show how they are connected. This is no minor undertaking.

The VisualComplexity web site was created by Manuel Lima, an interaction designer, based on research he began while attending the Parsons School of Design. Later on, when he was working as a Teaching Assistant as Parsons, he worked with Christopher Kirwan, to consolidate the research and launch the site.

By understanding the intricacy of networks and discerning patterns from the seeming chaos, we can achieve not only a structural understanding of the networks themselves, but we may also gain knowledge of how to implement major improvements in stability, robustness and security of these networks...knowledge that can help us move forward in not just a better understanding of the social graph, but of the very world around us and its inherent complexities.

The VisualComplexity Project

The VisualComplexity web site effectively functions as a catalog of visualizations of various types of networks, and currently hosts 557 different projects. Although it's pointed out that not all the networks shown are genuinely complex, those that aren't have been chosen for inclusion in the catalog because they demonstrate either an advancement in visual depiction techniques or they show conceptual uniqueness and originality of a subject.

For those interested in visualization techniques and maps, the site is a virtual treasure trove of beautifully created and engaging maps.

For example, there is the map the Processing.org flickr group, (a group interested in Processing - an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions):

There is the Web Trend map, a visualization of all the major players on the web, ordered by category, proximity, popularity, and perspective:

And, for a look at a truly complex visualization, check out the map entitled "A Working Brian Model":

The types of networks on the site can be filtered by subject (Music, Internet, Art, etc.), Method (Arc Diagrams, Data Flow, Globes, Radial, etc.), Trend (Blogosphere, del,icio.us, Flickr, etc.), author, or year. You can also take a look at the site's stats to see the number and percentage of projects by subject, most searched keywords, most viewed projects, and other interesting metadata about the project.

Visualization enthusiasts, prepare to lose yourself for hours in this inspiring and enlightening web site.

Curious to see how your tax dollars are spent? Check out the winning visualization below.

You can launch the winning project from this page here to see it in more detail.

Google also created a showcase of all the entries in a short video that nicely demonstrates the creativity involved with this contest.

The Data Viz Challenge was launched in February of this year in conjunction with Eyebeam, a not-for-profit art and technology center that served as the event host, and WhatWePayFor.com, a website that uses public data to estimate how tax money is spent. Andrew Johnson and Louis Garcia, who run WhatWePayFor, created an API (application programming interface) to provide developer access to their site's data.

The Grand Prize winner received $5,000 in prize money in addition to a timely mention on The Official Google Blog. Even if you're not typically a data visualization enthusiast yourself, it's hard not to be impressed (or perhaps, shocked), by the results.

Although the two seem only related by the map visualization aspect, they might be useful hand in hand to find that new apartment that's close to where everything (or nothing) is going on.

The application shows a listing of appropriate properties in a sidebar, allowing you to filter by criteria like pets, bedrooms, bathroom, rent and so on. As you move the map around, the available and appropriate properties appear on the map.

As for "foursquare Everywhere", Foursquare data is pulled in, allowing visualization of check-ins, tips, badges and mayor "coronations" worldwide. So after you've found the perfect place to rent using Oodle Rentals, you can switch over to "foursquare Everywhere" and see where the happening night clubs, coffee shops, restaurants and various other venues are in the area.

We have to say, we're fans of anything that suddenly offers a better visualization of what would otherwise be data we'd have to correlate on our own. Who wants to look through rental listings and then switch over and look it all up in a map? That's so 2000, not 2010. Now, if they would just get to offering a SimCity style view of map filtering, so we could see crime rates, traffic, pollution, noise, all aggregated together with rental listings and check-in data, then we'd be talking.

The visualization drew from Twitter use by Egyptians and influential others around the #jan25 uprising. Those writing in Arabic only are represented in red, only in English are in blue and overlap by various shades of purple. Influence, in terms of follows, are represented by lines and those who influence each other are located in proximity.

Super-high resolution PDF here.

According to Boguta, the language choice - most of the bloggers speak both Arabic and English - is an important element. Some make the choice to connect with other Arabic-speakers, probably a function of the organizational use of the Web by people on the ground. The choice of English is, among other things, a choice to spread the circumstances, flight and day-to-day activities of the first group, to the wider world.

"For me, the point is that the activists are cooperating with the west, on their own terms and in a constructive way...(I)n fact that is a key element and what allows this much bigger exoskeleton to tightly interface to the core. This is in contrast to what happened in Iran 2009...where the connections between those in Iran and the rest of the world were very thin and easily severed."

Wael Ghonim is a good example of how the visualization works. Large circle, well connected, surrounded by a large group of Twitter-users whom he influences.

Interesting to notice is the scattered group on the far left, which are mostly U.S. government and corporations like Google. "And that's probably how everyone in the rest of the network would like this future to look."

Street photo via Al Jazeera | thanks to Josh Jones-Dilworth