SOCIAL VISUALISATIONS / WEEPLACES & FLOWTOWN
10 August 2010
The latest data viz catching our eye
- Media Type
- Online
- User Generated Content
- Source
- News
- Tags
- Foursquare
- Online Communities
- Social Networking
- Data Visualisation
To paraphrase a well-worn Chinese proverb: Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I'll go "Ooooh! Pretty!"
At Contagious we love a good data visualisation, so much so that we've devoted an entire feature to its practical uses in our forthcoming Contagious 24 issue.
The latest beautiful representation of the seemingly mundane to catch our eye comes courtesy of Weeplaces.com - a site which links to the user's Foursquare account to create a map showing every place they've ever checked in. As the user presses 'play', an orange line zips around the map visiting each destination in date order. Locations can be clicked on to see who else has checked-in there, and visualisations are shareable with friends through Facebook and Twitter.
Weeplaces was built by the guys behind Movity.com who decided that there was a 'lack of people doing cool things with the Foursquare API', so knocked out Weeplaces in a weekend.
And while we're looking at social networking maps, we should really mention Flowtown's cartographical effort (above). Inspired by XKCD's online communities map from 2007, it offers an at-a-glance snapshot of who's hot and who's not in the world of social media sites and services.
It's worth comparing Flowtown's map with the XKCD original, if only to gaze in wonder at the decline of the once-mighty kingdom of MySpace...
http://weeplaces.com/foursquare/
http://www.flowtown.com/
XKCD online communities map
At Contagious we love a good data visualisation, so much so that we've devoted an entire feature to its practical uses in our forthcoming Contagious 24 issue.
The latest beautiful representation of the seemingly mundane to catch our eye comes courtesy of Weeplaces.com - a site which links to the user's Foursquare account to create a map showing every place they've ever checked in. As the user presses 'play', an orange line zips around the map visiting each destination in date order. Locations can be clicked on to see who else has checked-in there, and visualisations are shareable with friends through Facebook and Twitter.
Weeplaces was built by the guys behind Movity.com who decided that there was a 'lack of people doing cool things with the Foursquare API', so knocked out Weeplaces in a weekend.
And while we're looking at social networking maps, we should really mention Flowtown's cartographical effort (above). Inspired by XKCD's online communities map from 2007, it offers an at-a-glance snapshot of who's hot and who's not in the world of social media sites and services.
It's worth comparing Flowtown's map with the XKCD original, if only to gaze in wonder at the decline of the once-mighty kingdom of MySpace...
http://weeplaces.com/foursquare/
http://www.flowtown.com/
XKCD online communities map
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COMMENTS /
Andrew
Hello Contagious,
Thank you for sharing this with your audience. We are working to build the next level of functionality for Weeplaces - allowing people to compare friend maps at the same time, setting up filters, etc.
We are interested in hearing your readers ideas/feedback. If you have some thoughts about what you want to see, post them here or send me a note:
andrew@weeplaces.com
Cheers!
Alex
Hi Andrew - it's good to hear Weeplaces has some new developments in the pipeline. Hope you get some interesting suggestions!