M.I.T.

A friend passed along this little M.I.T. project – mycrocosm. The site’s homepage says about itself:

a web service that allows you to share snippets of information from the minutiae of daily life in the form in[sic] simple statistical graphs.

I’ll interpret that as an InfoViz twitter-like service. Using a very simple (although the grammar does take some getting used to) interface where you essentially use normal language words and numerals to create simple charts.

I’ve only played with it a bit, but it is kind of fun. You can check out the test graphs that I made.

However, a couple of odd points:

1. Login/Registration is only through OpenId so this clearly isn’t for the mainstream yet.
2. There is no site search so the only way to find stuff is either by someone telling you wear to look or by browsing the pages tag cloud.
3. There doesn’t appear to be a way to share the graphs outside of mycrocosm

If this is supposed to be a social/sharing data visualization service, the folks at M.I.T. need to make it easier to discover your friends/colleagues/whoever that are also on mycrocosm.

The graphs need to be accessible outside of mycrocosm. It’s fairly easy to use the Google Chart API to get some simple visualizations into my blog but there isn’t any sort of method to take my mycrocosm visualizations macro ;~).

If my tongue-in-cheek description of this service as a twitter for InfoViz is correct, then it should be hooked up to twitpic or friendfeed or facebook, or etc. so that the folks in my social graph will be notified when I’ve done another minutiae-driven chart or whatever.

Ok, so what’s good about it?

• It’s kinda fun – for geeks like me
• The chart design is pretty solid – not a lot of chart junk, color schemes seem to be carefully chosen etc. (although why they decided that a pie chart should be the default chart is beyond me)
• Data entry is simple – keep in mind that this is clearly for small data sets, but still you don’t have to be an R developer or know xml and javascript to create a little graph – you don’t even have to know basic HTML

I’ll be keeping an eye on it to see where they go with it.

Tags: infoviz, MIT, mycrocosm, Twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 9:09 pm and is filed under visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.