Older stuff i've not posted yet, round 2 - The Flowing Data guide to visualisations

Nice rundown on data visualisation tools from the Guardian and flowing data... yum!

Nathan Yau, the statistician beind data blog Flowing Data, presents his guide to what you can do with all those numbers

It seems like every week there's a new Web application that promises to harness the power of the masses and unlock the secrets within large datasets. Others aim to be the YouTube of data: a site that makes data fun and entertaining while starting conversations that would've otherwise never began.

This all sounds good on paper - tons of people analyzing the world's data - but there's still quite a ways to go before social data analysis becomes useful to the data-oriented crowd and an even longer way to go before data goes mainstream, if it ever does. Let's take a look at what's available now.

Many Eyes

Many Eyes, from the IBM Visual Communications Lab, is the front runner. The application provides a large toolset from your standard line, bar, and pie charts to your more advanced network and tree graphs along with the more abstract visualizations like wordle
and phrase
net.

Alongside these visualisations that anyone can use, Many Eyes provides ways to bookmark and discuss, which is really a huge selling point in social data analysis. I mean, you can't exactly analyze with a group of people if you can't exchange ideas, right?

Swivel

While Many Eyes feels more like a research project, Swivel has tried to commercialize the idea of social data. It came out a little after Many Eyes. It's geared towards businesses while trying to make data fun, although it seems like they might be getting away from that. The visualization offerings are for the most part your basic charts.

Data360

Now we move farther away from Many Eyes and more into business. Data360 is all about business and the site looks it. Very sterile, I think is the best way to put it. While I remember there
being a social aspect to it, I don't think there was a whole lot. It's basically putting your data online with a simple time series chart.

Google Docs

OK, so Google Docs isn't social data analysis per sey, but it's in the genre and it's worth mentioning mainly because it allows for syncrhonous collaboration. You can edit a spreadsheet and create a chart with a group of people in real-time. All the other apps are asynchronous where you leave a comment, and people can see it after you've posted it. Google Docs, however, let's you chat and collaborate, which is important with social data. Again, the visualization is not much farther advanced than your standard Microsoft Excel, but it's a start.

The Rest

Finally, there are plenty of other sites that are more data-specific and others that are springing up every day. SpatialKey, for example, provides mapping tools; while Predictify attempts to predict future events by tapping the wisdom of crowds. Dolores Labs is making heavy use of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to accomplish large-scale menial tasks.

The world of social data anlysis is really just at the tip of the iceberg right
now. However, as more data becomes available, visualization advances, data analysis starts to factor in, and more people take notice, there could be potentially big things in store for social data analysis in the future.

Nathan Yau is editor of Flowing Data