Visual.ly helps you visualize data (including my Twitter use)

I’m a great fan of data visualization, and it’s not something I have done much of myself (I can make an Excel graph). So I will be interested to follow Visual.ly, a fascinating new project that showcases data visualization efforts (check out Golden Parachutes and the History of Location Technology) and promises to develop and offer some dataviz tools.

For now, I used its Twitterize tool to visualize my own Twitter use:

Interesting visualization. (When I have more time, I will play with the code and see if I can make it fit my blog format’s width better.) Clearly, some of the data visualized doesn’t go back very far. In the past week or two, I participated in the meme where you substituted “duck” for a word in a famous quote. It was fun and I had several tweets with “duck” in them, but over time, that word would not stand out in my tweets. At least, I don’t think so. The rate of less than one tweet a day seems inaccurate over pretty much any time period, even though my tweets have been down lately as I have spent pretty full days visiting JRC newsrooms without a lot of time to tweet (11 tweets yesterday and seven Tuesday).

Visual.ly also lets you compare tweeps. Here’s how I compare to my Journal Register (and former TBD) colleague Jim Brady (but I gotta say: We don’t look that much alike):

Not sure I like the contrast of me with a tie and Brady in a t-shirt (I haven’t worn a tie in a couple weeks at least and I’m wearing a t-shirt as I write this). But I do like the slimming effects. The default settings, of course, make us look a lot alike. I don’t look much better using the tools to individualize by hair color, eye color, skin tone and “accessories” (I could choose beard and glasses but not both, and could not choose beard color. I chose gray as my hair color because my beard is mostly white, so it gave me gray hair on top, but the default brown beard).

Nonetheless, this first swing at Visual.ly was fun. I’ll be watching for more dataviz tools. I’m pleased and intrigued so far.

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