Data visualization and structure dictates many aspects of our society. A new search engine called Visual.ly proves finding important data and being able to not only interpret but render it in an easy to read format is crucial. Seeing isn’t believing; it’s knowing.
What Is Visual.ly?
Share
Visual.ly has been tailor made for data visualizations and infographics. If you can interpret data, statistics and demographics in an easy to understand package, Visual.ly will allow you to share your work.
Explore
The first thought that comes to mind is “why can’t I just use Google to find infographics?” Sure, you could search data visualization and interactive media models to your heart’s content but is it what you’re really looking for? That’s where Visual.ly is looking to separate itself from typical search engines by curating data in addition to actively searching for existing content.
Create
Visual.ly also has a pretty rockin’ visualization tool that compiles an infographic based off your personality on Twitter. The service takes in to account the topics you tweet most about, who replies to you (and how you reply back) and the Tweets you see by your followers. I found my infographic accurate for the most part (Visual.ly did show my love for coffee, not going to deny that.) and discovered a few things I didn’t know about my profile especially reach and interaction with my followers. There is also an Infographic WYSIWYG in the works, for which interested parties can sign up to join the invite list now.
Visual.ly is no amateur project. The creative minds behind the data search engine hail from Mint, Wallstats, AP and a crack team of Web Superstars. If you needed more evidence of Visual.ly’s validity, the company launched with $400,000 in Seed financing thanks to an event called 500 Startups which pairs entrepreneurs and investors with startups that have yet to launch giving them the opportunity to receive early funding.
The Twitter Visualizer Project
Visualize your Twitter account in a whole new way. With the Visual.ly Twitter Visualizer, also known as “Twitterize Me” to the newly addicted, your Tweets and Twitter stats go in to make a sweet infographic with not much more than a click of a button. As mentioned above, the infographic generator tool takes in data from the things you’ve posted ,and your overall interactions and stats to produce a fairly true rendition of you: Twitterized.
The coolest part of the Twitterize Me tool is that you have your own avatar generated to reflect your Twitter personality. There are 11 outfits that depict your overall persona, including gamer, designer, athlete and even rapper … there are also over 25 different ‘accesories’ that show-off your likely interest (or “obsession”).
Put yourself against a friend’s account or versus a random celebrity, including Britney Spears, Jay Leno, Snoop Dogg, Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama and more.
The only potential downfall of this tool is that you may find out you’re not as interesting as you think (or maybe the celebrity is, but perhaps that’s okay since they do have at least a million followers each). Also, there’s an already checked box to follow @Visually on Twitter, but all you need to do is uncheck it if you’re not feeling so friendly.
Why I’m Excited About Visual.ly
Infographics and other means of visualizing data play a massive role in the online world and impact real-world events. Companies dictate their corporate procedure from data and consumers base their reactions to products and brands on information sculpted from surveys, friends and other sources. Rendering mountains of information in a way that’s interactive and actually useful is what drives people to research data that is relevant to them.
More importantly they make big data accessible. Amazing data visualization concepts and infographics have been left to discovery via Blogs and Social Networks. Visual.ly not only wants to consolidate data visualization but create original concepts from information that would otherwise be disregarded due its large almost impossible to navigate
Visual.ly came off with an impressive launch: over 60,000 people signed up for beta invites since hearing about the service:
“We knew we were onto something big, having seen the power of data visualization work so dramatically across the Web,” said Stew Langille, co-founder and CEO of Visual.ly. “Three months in, we’ve gotten more validation that we could have imagined, and an A-list group of partners that shows we’re the real deal.”
[Full disclosure: Tal Siach, founder of Walyou.com, is a co-founder of Visual.ly. However, the author of this article is a neutral party.]
