I have an art and design background. One of the key ideas in art (and design) is negative space. Negative space is the area of a drawing or sculpture or whatever that is not the subject. In the illustration bellow The negative space is everything that is not the flowers the vase or the table.

160k in art school education deployed here.

The importance of negative space in establishing things like scale becomes clear when you compare the A and B images. The negative space creates the context for the flowers, and the context in turn helps the viewer infer certain things about the flowers.

The same thing can be true when visualizing data. Placing data sets onto maps creates context around the data. The context allows us to see relationships. Similarly creating a visual timeline out of a list of events (or data points) lets us see better how those events relate by showing us the space between them. FreeTime uses a fixed contextual framework (time) to combine very different data sets. It is this context that allows FreeTime to transform data into information.

We’re eleven days to our first Beta and I haven’t really posted about what it is that we’re actually making here.

Graphient is building an application called FreeTime. FreeTime makes dynamic visual time lines out of whatever data or records you have laying around provided they have a time stamp or an identifiable time component.  It doesn’t matter to FreeTime whether this is a database of some kind, or a spreadsheet or a website. FreeTime uses the common framework of time to bring all these kinds of data into one view so the user can explore it better. Because time is a common dimension to data and information FreeTime can bring data from many different disciplines together.

Example uses include really simple stuff like interactive historical time lines, or very complex things like media analysis or longitudinal study analysis. Some people we’ve talked to just want to use it to see what music they were listening to on a particular day.

We see time as a way to create context for the rapidly proliferating large-open-data-sets out there. We’ll be talking more about this as things develop. In the meantime, if you’re interested in being a beta tester get in touch.

Apparently, it’s free-for-all Friday here at Graphient. I just started using live search in TweetDeck for the word “visualization” and I feel like I jacked my head straight into the internerd. Also I drank a lot of green tea just now.

Ok, randomness is a really hard thing. Deriving actual randomness is hard work. A lot of mathematical models have been created over the years to describe randomness. Conveniently for you dear reader, this guy Daniel A. Becker has visualized a bunch of them for you. Enjoy this tasty and nutritious treat here.

Poisson Distribution. Look out Roger Mexico.

Ok, these probably won’t be daily. But they might be, since Data Visualization is so hot right now. Anyway, here’s an interactive map showing ridership of the NYC subway system from 1905 to now. The map is by Sha Hwang, a visual design technologist at Stamen Design in San Francisco. Check it out

Nice work, Mr Hwang.

In 17 days, our first beta release of FreeTime will come out. Also our new website. Pressure’s on.

This is directly between mark's desk and my desk.

I suppose Mr. Tran’s Sriracha concern can’t really be considered a startup anymore, But, it is an epic tale of capitalism. A company with humble roots overcoming epic adversity, including war (try that you web 2.0 feebs) to become the Heinz of hot sauce.

Read the NY Times article here and feel the burn.

This is going to be a little off topic for us, but bear with me. When did facebook start feeling old and sort of lame? Well, if you’re me, it always seemed a little lame. But now it feels outdated too. And not just because Twitter is getting all the glory. It feels outdated to me because ad supported business models feel outdated to me.

I’ve lived through a couple of iterations of the Internet now. When excitement over content was rekindled at the beginning of web 2.0 it seemed like advertising was going to pay for everything, and thus what would otherwise be expensive services would be delivered to users for free. Everything became (just like in the 90s!) about leveraging content. This time around the content was user generated, so it didn’t represent a cost center for the companies serving ads against it. Or at least not an obvious cost center. Turns out hosting all those photos isn’t cheap. It also turns out that the advertisers aren’t quite as full of money as they may have seemed initially. Particularly when the economy is coming down around everyone’s ears.

The whole ad-supported model is starting to feel a little stale. And with it, ad-supported businesses like facebook are starting to feel a little stale if not outright spammy. Mapping the social graph in order to better serve audiences to advertisers seems like pre-crash thinking. The so called attention economy is giving way to the real economy.

It’s no longer going to be about eyeballs, it’s going to be about providing real services and charging for them. The fact that the world’s hottest startup, Twitter isn’t thinking about advertising but about tools in its search for revenue seems to confirm that. The web is growing up, and as it does it is going to start providing more relevant and compelling services than ever before. The next web isn’t the social web, it’s the useful web.

We have a design philosophy here at Graphient. It’s actually encoded right into our mission statement. The relevant bit is the part about making tools simple enough for any user but powerful enough for business and science. We’re making a tool that does very complex, powerful things and it needs to appear to the casual user that it does them in a very simple and straightforward way. At the same time, if someone puts the effort in to learn our software, complexity and depth should be revealed to him or her proportionally to their understanding of the tool.

After going through a lot of different metaphors in seeking to explain this philosophy to people outside the company I have settled on this: The ideal user interface is like a kiddy pool that is a mile deep. Anyone one should be able to jump in and paddle around, but an experienced user should be able to dive deep in.

I would say that FreeTime, our first product comes close to this ideal. We’re still going to have to include some set up assistants to help people along initially. To push our metaphor a little too far, these will be like flotation devices for novice swimmers.

More on that as it develops.

We have a mission statement here at Graphient. It took us a fair amount of time and a lot of re-writes to work it out properly. One reason it took so long was some confusion on my part about what a mission statement really is. It seemed pretty obvious to me that our mission as hardheaded businessmen was to make huge amounts of money. Or, put another way, to become profitable in a timely manner and maximize shareholder value. Turns out those aren’t missions, and they cannot be used to accurately measure the success of the enterprise or to motivate those involved.

We finally worked it out as “Graphient’s mission is to provide everyone in the world with platforms for the organization and visualization of information that are simple enough for any home user, but powerful enough for research, science, and business.”

There’s nothing in there about profitability, and were we a Silicon Valley company we might be content to end this conversation here and go play frisbee with our dog or something. Fortunately we live in New York, and if living here has taught us anything, it is that if you don’t make enough money for rent and food, you have to move back to whatever provincial backwater you came from.

That’s a round about way of saying that one of the tests for whether or not you are a company or just a bunch of guys sitting in room together engaged in company-like behavior is profitability. Profit is the test that must be met. It is what validates the mission, and without it you don’t have an enterprise, you have a meme.

Jer’s blog blprnt landed in my inbox this morning via google alert. He’s put together a pretty cool visualization in Processing by mining Twitter for the phrase “Just Landed” and then parsing out the location the tweeter had just landed in, along with the home location listed in their twitter profile. There are some problems with the assumptions made in the data collection process but, whatever. If Jer wants the science to be perfect than he’ll figure that out on his own.

The results of all that mining and processing look like this:

Awesome. Find out more about his methodology and check out some animation here.