The World Cup is under way in South Africa. For a soccer fan, being able to watch 3 games played by the best teams in the world every day is a dream come true.
To me, what has been particularly interesting this time around is how the media has been pulling all the stops to show, communicate and broadcast the games – there’s TV, mobile, newspapers, radio, live commentary on blogs, Twitter and lots more.
It’s been really cool to see that visualizations have been used so widely, sometimes to illustrate an on-going game, sometimes to put results in perspective.
This one is from the New York Times, for a live game, Greece vs. Nigeria:
This visualization represents Brazil’s performance in World Cups:
There’s a lot more, for example here, here, and here, just to mention a few.
A simple graph that explains so much. (via Flowing Data)
Explore the major health issues in the U.S. with a visualization by GE. It works quite well, except that I don’t find the “compare this with that” interface very intuitive.
Like many people, I’ve been using Twitter more regularly over the last several months. I’ve always been interested (and a big believer) in technologies that promote social connectedness and Twitter certainly falls in this category.
I am finding that I get a lot of value from it when I follow my friends – it’s an excellent way to stay in touch. However, it’s becoming really apparent to me that the Twitter interface presented to us by applications such as Twitterrific and TweetDeck leave a lot to be desired, especially when you follow people who are heavy users and post several times a day.
Case in point: Robert Scoble. Here’s a guy who attends dozens of tech events a year and whose job revolves around communicating ideas and sending links around. I want to follow him, I find that his content is good. But all list-based Twitter clients make following someone like him really hard. Here’s what my TweetDeck app looked like this morning:
I like to see what Robert is up to, but this interface makes it really hard to read all of his tweets and follow all the links. Not to mention that someone like Robert overshadows all of my friend’s tweets, a problem that can be mitigated in TweetDeck through groups. But that’s just part of the story.
Twitter is powerful because it’s a universal messaging platform – it’s used in so many different ways by so many people. I would love to see (and hopefully contribute to) interfaces that are designed specifically for certain uses, such as following a small group of close friends, or see what powerful networkers like Robert Scoble are doing and sharing with the world. One-fits-all interfaces like what we have today, especially at the desktop level, dilute the user experience any way you look at it.
Music is everywhere, yet it’s very hard to find software tools that help people visualize, categorize and navigate through their music collections.
This demo from the MIT Media Lab shows what’s possible when you combine music metadata and information visualization techniques.
This reminds me very much of a project developed by a good friend of mine, back when we both worked at France Telecom R&D. Sadly the project was sent down the intellectual property path and now lives in the patent portfolio of a large telecommunications company. In other words, it probably will never see the light of day.
Via CrunchGear.
Last summer, Flowing Data organized a contest around visualization of personal data. It invited readers to submit data “flowing” off of them, such as how much they spend on coffee, how much sleep they get, their iTunes listening history, etc. The catch was that the data had to be in some graphical representation. In their words:
“Send me your data in the form of a graph, a photo, a hand-drawing, or any other visualization you can think of. It can be interactive or static, simple or complex, serious or humorous, analytical or artistic, or all the above. It’s up to you.”
The submissions were quite interesting.
The problem of information overload has been widely discussed in the media and blogosphere. At Web 2.0 Expo in NY a couple of weeks ago, Clay Shirky, adjunct professor at NYU and renowned Internet thinker, suggested a new take on the issue.
In his view, it’s not that we have too much information – we’ve had lots of information for a long time. The real problem is that we simply don’t have good enough information filters.
It’s a good talk, but it will ‘cost’ you 20 minutes.
Last week I watched the vice-presidential debate on TV and followed the Twittosphere’s reaction live on election.twitter.com. This new site by Twitter works like a filter for all tweets coming through the system. It is nothing but a page with incoming tweets that refer to the election and the candidates.
Visiting election.twitter.com during the debate was entertaining, and also a distraction. But in my view, it represented a social media breakthrough. It was the first social space tied to a live broadcast event that felt compelling to me. The idea is not new by any means, but Twitter made it happen. In fact, Twitter lends itself perfectly to these sorts of social applications.
I expect Twitter to be doing more of this in future. If they don’t, they will be missing a great opportunity. And there’s no reason not to do it. Tweets by themselves can be very noisy, especially if you are following lots of people.
When you add a layer of categorization to the messages, tweets from anyone can be potentially interesting. With topical groups, which could be static (“Baseball”) or dynamic (“Red Sox vs. Angels Live”), Twitter would become more useful, focused and powerful.
Friendfeed recently added rooms and I am subscribing to a few feeds there even though I don’t have an account with the service.
Do it Twitter!
Just came back from a quick trip to DC.
US Airways is advertising a cool system where you can find out information about your connecting flight by sending them a txt message from your mobile phone.
I didn’t have to use it, so I don’t know if it really works. But it’s certainly a good idea, a nice SMS application.
Lee Gomes is possibly my favorite writer over at The Wall Street Journal. He’s got more of a tech focus than other writers, so I tend to read his articles more than others.
A while back he reported on a study conducted by neuroscientists at the University of Southern California interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.
The bottom line is that “new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it”. According to researchers, “when you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’”
Fascinating research. Definitely explains why I keep refreshing those web sites about Formula 1 every few minutes! That has to stop. Maybe the new Slife 2.0 will help me with this.
Click here for the whole story. Should be on the free side of the fence at the WSJ.
