Features

March 05, 2007, Many Eyes has been running for a month now, so in this post Martin and Fernanda showcase some of the best visualizations, so far, and talk about the future of "social data analysis" on the Web.

The idea for Many Eyes came from some surprising behaviors that we each serendipitously observed.

Several years ago, Fernanda was working on an email visualization program. When it came time to run experiments, she was extremely careful to let her subjects know that visualizations of their email would be completely private - the assumption was that no one would ever want to reveal their personal mail. To her surprise, her subjects immediately began to ask for ways to share the visualizations with others! In fact, it turned out that the process of storytelling and reminiscing was one of the most valuable aspects of the visualizations.

Read more.