Large Firm Getting into Facebook Apps - Many Eyes from IBM

IBM Research here in Cambridge has been doing some cool stuff for a while in the social software space (see IBM’s Social Software Initiatives from 2005 on this blog). Now they have developed Many Eyes. Their sites says, “Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.” It was created by IBM's Collaborative User Experience research group. They have a Many Eyes blog.

On the blog they show and interesting comparison of the text in the US Presidential state of the union addresses in 2002 and 2003. You seen the relative tag clouds for each text with side by side color coded comparisons to see how terms rose or shrunk from one text to the next.

I found it especially interesting that they have a Many Eyes Facebook application. The application helps you collect, format and prepare social network data and visualize it on Many Eyes. I wonder if any of the other big players have Facebook apps? Have you seen other examples?

Update - Rich Hoeg provides a look the broader concept of visualization engineering in his post, Engineering Data Visualization.

Comments

[Rich Hoeg]

Hi Bill:

I was intrigued to see that we both had posted about Many Eyes, but from a different "visual angle!" I agree that Many Eyes from IBM is worth a look. In addition, if your readers are interested in the broader concept of visualization engineering, click upon my name and they will be directed to my blog post. My research found some nice supportive content including a visualization eningeering seminar series from Duke University, Georgia Tech tutorials, etc.

Rich

[junker456]

I really want facebook to integrate with my rhubcom.com net conferencing system, so that way we can use it more directly. I like the idea that one day we can talk via video conferencing through a social network like facebook.