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Watching web goings-on live with visualizations

Watching activities live on the internet, especially in the Web 2.0 space, offers endless entertainment.

I have a fascination with the “live” sites where you can visualize what’s going on across an entire site such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg, or Del.icio.us. It appears to be mostly for entertainment value, although I’m sure that researchers and journalists have these toolkits in their toolbelt when they need a fresh take on a story. I find it also sparks creative ideas or sends you along paths you never would have found otherwise.

Here are some of my favorites to watch. Check out the screenshots for a preview of what awaits behind the link. The map-based visualizations are enabled by Google Maps geo-developers, and they recently had a conferenced named “Where 2.0” (great name).

  • Twittervision – I managed to capture one from Austin, TX, while I too was hiding from the thunderstorms that were coming through. Since there’s often a rate of over 20 Twitters in the time period that this algorithm uses, I only tried a few times to capture one of my own twits. This is the 3D version with a glowing globe that spins around and then marks each twit. Very cool.
  • Flickrvision – This is the classic view of the flat world map. This particular picture is of a chipmunk and I apologize for the poor screenshot quality but the layout that I’m confined to won’t like even this size of graphics, so I encourage you to click the Flickrvision link and see it for yourself.
  • LiveMarks – This visualization lets you watch the bookmarks as they’re being added by all users of del.icio.us. One of the neatest visualizations that I believe was popularized by del.icio.us is tag clouds.
  • Digg’s API contest winners for visualizations – This screen shows Digg Charts, which isn’t nearly as fun as the winner, Digg City, but it looks so much like a dashboard I had to include it. BSM Dashboard offers views not of popular stories but of high priority
  • These aren’t “live” viewers, but TouchGraph offers neat visualizations of connections between objects, such as books or movies on Amazon, or connections between “web 2.0” or major retailer’s websites via Google’s related links database.

Wow, I think we need these types of visualizations for all the connections that BMC’s products have because we have done so many integrations to get the BSM story just right. I suppose Topology Discovery has the closest match to these types of visualizations.

I’d better tear my eyes off of TwitterVision long enough to post this entry… what visualizations help you with your job lately?