Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 6th August 2008
1 COMMENT 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the Last.fm graphs I discussed a few weeks ago? It gave a gorgeous and insightful visualization of your music history. The master behind this technology is Lee Byron, read his explanation and motivation on his personal blog. Now another developer, Jeff Clark, has created a Twitter version called StreamGraphs:
The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph.
You can either enter a random search word or your username. Then StreamGraph grabs the data of the 200 latest tweets containing the keyword. See the graph in this post for the visualization of our Twitter account. Check out the launch date of the iPhone to see how accurate the visualization is.
Don’t forget to check out some earlier work of Jeff Clark, as he’s also the man behind TwitArcs and Twitter Spectrum.
Written on 1st June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I remember when I had first installed Last.fm on my Mac. When Last.fm was done scrobbling all the songs I had played so far, hours of studying all the interesting tables and numbers that showed up followed. After years of playing music with no specified overview of what I listened and when, Last.fm answered almost all my questions. But now there’s a new kid on the block which even fascinates me more. It’s called LastGraph and offers some eye-candy in the form of Last.fm data visualizations. Here’s one:
This is a time-line poster. It took me five minutes of waiting before LastGraph had analyzed my data and another 2 minutes to crunch it into this “ocean, medium detailed” poster. So it took this web-app some time, yet I love the result. As it turns out, I’m quite predictable when it comes to listening music. Every time I go to a concert, I listen to that artist or band obsessively. See Kaiser Chiefs in November, Arctic Monkeys in December, Eels in March, and The Wombats in April. The Joy Division spike is caused by the excellent movie Control from Anton Corbijn. And can you tell when I got my iPod Touch?
If you want a closer look, it’s a matter of looking up the Artist History Graph. By crunching out the Kaiser Chiefs data, you can tell it was a one-day show. The love for this rock act didn’t last till after the concert (blue arrow):
All the data is available for exporting in Excel, CVS, and JSON formats. For 10 dollars a year, you get a premium account which comes with hotlinking to your graphs and some small dynamic signature images you can use for forums or other similar things.
So, LastGraph has shown me I’m predictable when it comes to listening music. To get an insight like this, and a bunch of more graphs and time lines, browse to LastGraph. The site is written and run by Andrew Godwin, and I think he has a great job. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for him, ’cause it wouldn’t make sense if Last.fm didn’t acquire this pure API magic.
Written on 21st April 2008
5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
We keep running into people who are making interesting search applications. Like Laurent Baleydier, the CEO of KartOO technologies. Over a coffee at the altsearchengines day, he told us that KartOO specializes in visualizing internet and intranet data to improve the accessibility of search engines. The techniques are developed in the French University Labs in Clermont, France.
Next Web editor Boris and KartOO president Laurent Beleydier
KartOO runs three search engines. KartOO.com – a free Meta search engine that allows you to find your results trough in interactive map -, UJIKO.com – a social thumbs up/down engine -, and KVisu.com – a rather spectacular engine that shows your search data as a land map.
The engines have at least one thing in common: impressive graphics. Whether it’s your style or not, you can’t deny that KartOO understands that you have to spoil the eyes when it comes to visualization. Some other search engines, like Quintura, seem to forget that.
I also like the fact that KartOO uses the engines of Yahoo and Google, since a lot of people are still a bit hesitated to use another engine than Google. The alt search engines are really important, as they are the pioneers who invent our search future. Yet when it comes to a quick search, people still use the search giant. When services like KartOO build on the strength of Google and make it a richer tool, I think they have a better chance to bridge the gap between Google and alternative search engines.
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