ReadWriteWeb

If all your interests and skills were reduced to a scannable set of tags and thumbnails, what would your ego look like?

That's the question startup YouTego attempts to answer with its Web-based app that asks users to spend a few minutes in navel-gazing self-definition to create a snappy page of terms and related images. It's simple, social and actually quite fun once you get the hang of it.

A recently released Google Labs product called Fusion Tables allowed users to grab data from spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs and other sources and create compelling, comprehensive visualizations from a merged data set.

Google has just announced it's releasing an API for Fusion Tables. The API integrates with Google Maps, App Engine, Base Data and Visualizations APIs, as well, to allow for motion charts, timelines, graphs and maps with all the data available and running on Google's infrastructure. The API allows users to upload data from any source, from text files to full databases, and see their data merged and compared in cool visualizations. Surprisingly, that's not even the best part.

StatPlot is the newest project of sports statistic aggregator StatSheet and you're likely to enjoy it whether you're a sports fan or not. The site makes it easy to assemble attractive, dynamic charts for sports statistics in minutes. Navigate through the long list of options by point and click, autocomplete, cut and paste and you're done. Loads of data is already there and available for your use at no charge.

It's a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially - hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There's OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it's just great. It's still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today - we're impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.

We like tools that are fascinating to use and make users look smarter than their peers. Visualization apps and sites rank pretty high on the fascination-o-meter, and they're also great for those of us who learn best by seeing and doing, rather than simply reading text.

The folks at Thinkmap (the makers of Visual Thesaurus) have just launched a tool called VocabGrabber that is absolutely as cool to play with, as it is informative and useful. It takes any text a user chooses (it can process an obscene amount of copy - up to 200,000 characters, or about 100 pages) and parses it for likely vocabulary words, organizing them in several fascinating ways and showing linguistic and contextual links to other terms.

The iPhone is clearly making some inroads in the business world, and RoamBi, which launched today, is one of the many new companies that is trying to win over some of these business customers. RoamBi's mission is to make spreadsheets readable and browsable on the iPhone (iTunes link), and its designers have done a great job at turning dry and unreadable spreadsheets into highly useful interactive mini-apps. These 'apps' allow users to visualize their data on the small iPhone screen, where they would otherwise be squinting at columns full of unreadable numbers.

When you think of virtual worlds, the first one that probably pops into your head is Second Life, but in reality, there are a number of different virtual worlds out there. There are worlds for socializing, worlds for gaming, even worlds for e-learning. But one thing that most virtual worlds have in common is that they are places for play, not practicality. (Yes, even the e-learning worlds are designed with elements of "fun" in mind). Outside of some reports that virtual worlds will replace web conferencing in the enterprise, we haven't seen a lot of innovation in this space which would make businesses sit up and take notice. However, that may be about to change thanks to new software that lets you perform data visualization and manipulation techniques within the virtual world environment.

Earlier this week when we wrote about "The Perfect Social Tool," a commenter on the post hinted that a service called Favo may be it. Curious, we went to check it out. Well, Favo may not be the social tool we were dreaming of, but by all appearances, it does look like something we want to try. Although Favo hasn't launched yet, it appears to be an intelligent bookmark manager that could finally have us ending our relationship with delicious for good.

What's going on with the 3D web? At one point, it was being heralded as the next big thing. Is that still the case? Take for example, the virtual world Second Life. Once a booming place where every business had set up their online presence, the formerly happening hotspot is now gloomy and dead. As one-time Second Life reporter Eric Krangel said, hanging out in Second Life is "about as fun as watching paint dry."

Imagine TweetDeck as an online application. Now imagine that you could use its paneled dashboard interface to keep tabs on your other online identities, too. With PeopleBrowsr, you can. This new application, currently in alpha, lets you update your networks, follow your friends, organize your favorites, and search for content across networks that include Twitter, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, Seesmic, identi.ca, Photobucket, upcoming, and FriendFeed.

Part of the appeal of Facebook to the media, no doubt, comes from the fact that much of its use remains shrouded in secrets. It is difficult to get a good grasp on what's really happening within the walls of the popular social network. There are data points on its current valuation, the number of applications on the platform, and the number of users. But there's rarely a clear indication of what's happening at the user level - beyond the now platitudinous "throwing sheep" assessment.

That's what makes something like Project Palantir so interesting. Because we get a brief glimpse into how Facebook is really being used.

Web 2.0 applications like delicious, diigo, Ma.gnolia, and others changed bookmarking forever. What used to be a private activity isolated to your computer became a social experience where friends could easily share, search, blog, and tag each other's favorite links. But personal, private bookmarking never really went away because, face it, there are some links that don't need to be shared. For those links, a service called Tidy Favorites delivers an innovative new way to work with your bookmarks using an intuitive visual search engine and dashboard.

When Google launched its Visualization API in March, it only allowed developers to create applications on top of spreadsheets in Google Docs. Starting today, developers can also use the API to create graphs and gadgets from any data source connected to the web, including SQL databases and Excel spreadsheets. The Visualization API gives developers the ability to build gadgets, using a set of over 40 different types of visualizations, ranging from interactive bar charts and timelines, to maps and gauges.

Amazon's Windowshop.com is a new site introduced late last week which allows you to virtually browse through the best-selling Amazon.com products in various categories. You can scroll through the content and zoom in and out on product previews in a style that very much reminds of how the Cooliris browser plugin works. With Windowshop.com, you can virtually "window shop" the latest and greatest in Amazon.com books, music, videos, and games.

The U.S. presidential elections are right around the corner and it seems that just about everyone is looking for news, poll results, and other political coverage both online and off. For those of you who are still eagerly devouring anything related to the elections, you'll want to check out these five tools for visualizing election data. From earmarks to electoral votes, there's a lot you can learn from the apps listed here.

Cover flow is one of the slickest designs ever made by Apple. There's no doubt that it gives a whole new meaning to album art and even makes users more appreciative of album covers. However, what if you could go beyond your album covers and do the same for your Flickr images? Well we have the perfect app to do the job and it's called FotoViewr.

The wonderful Information Aesthetics blog points us to human-computer interaction student Chris Harrison's Digg Rings visualization. Digg Rings is the latest in a series of awesome visualization projects from Harrison, and it displays a year's worth of Digg data in an absolutely stunning manner. These are interactive visualizations like those from Digg Labs, but they're equally beautiful and would make one heck of a poster.

Last.fm is a great music service that keeps track of your listening habits. Though you can view stats such as last played tracks, top artists, or most played songs with just words and numbers, it can be limiting in so many ways. We're huge fans of visualization tools, so wouldn't it be cool if you could grab a visual history of your Last.fm stats? LastGraph is just the service for the job.

Looking to visualize your Facebook friend graph? You can with a Facebook app called Nexus. This app is a friend grapher that displays a visual analysis of your Facebook connections. But it's not just a pretty picture: in addition to viewing how your friends are connected, you can use Nexus to discover what interests your friends share and which of your friends are the most similar to you.

Twistori, according to the site, is the "first step in an ongoing social experiment." The brainchild of Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Twistori pulls tweets from Twitter (via Summize) containing specific keywords: i love, i hate, i think, i believe, i feel, and i wish. In then publishes the tweets it finds anonymously in a non-stop, auto-updating river of news. The result is a continuous stream of feelings from the Twitter community.

Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. It's been a busy week, with a RWW interview with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, iPhone analysis aplenty, a special look at Web visualization, reviews of Semantic Apps Twine and Reuters Open Calais, and much more. And don't forget to click through to our website and leave a comment on our posts, for a chance to win a daily $30 Amazon gift voucher.