So, you hear a lot less about cloud computing these days and a lot more about “the Real Time Internet.” In a move that should surprise exactly no one, hype factory TechCrunch is going to be hosting an event about the implications of Real Time. I expect to see more of these events, seminars, and camps from the usual suspects over the coming months.
Rest assured that Graphient will not be changing its business model or the specs of FreeTime to meet this new challenge head on. Like the Cloud, Real Time is an important concept to keep in mind as technology evolves in front of us. Filtered streams of data are exciting and in many ways important to the work we are doing at Graphient. But true Real Time is still a long way off and the oncoming hype spasm will likely muddy the waters in many ways. Much like it did for Cloud Computing.
By now, you have probably seen Sir Tim Berners-Lee talking about the importance of Open Data at this year’s TED conference. If you haven’t here it is. Take a look because it’s important:
I’m posting this now because the Open Data movement seems to be getting some traction–at least in Government circles. A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration launched Data.gov a clearing house for government data. Washington D.C. has become a leader in municipal public data, putting some 260 feeds of data out in raw form. And now the UK has decided to get in on the act: Gordon Brown the embattled Prime Minister, announced yesterday that none other than Sir Tim Himself would be heading up the initiative to open England’s data up to the public.
This was largely damage control after a series of embarrassing disclosures about how members of Parliament expense things, but it is a welcome development all the same.
We here at Graphient wish Sir Tim the best of luck moving forward and very much hope that FreeTime will become the application of choice for those looking at all that data.
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.
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.
