Fastest Time-To-Collaborative-Visualization!

My former colleagues at Google have released some great tools for data visualization. While advanced visualization tools have been available for many years, it's never been easier to (a) author, and (b) share. One of my favorites is the Motion Chart, first advanced by Hans Rosling's GapMinder Foundation---an organization dedicated to making world-development data freely available and its meaning easily accessible to the generally unaware public.

As an example, I've prepared a Motion Chart below showing users and usage (share of monthly attention) of a few interesting sites (datasource credit: compete.com; errors mine more likely than not). NB: the data is for US audience only, and I've adjusted the Meebo data by 5x to account for traffic through their widgets.

It's better to view this chart on log-log scale: first mouse over the axes and click on "Log", then click the Play button

A few interesting observations jump out at me when seeing the animation:

1. Yahoo still commands the most attention, but Google's catching up, fast. This reaffirms my belief that Yahoo is sitting on a gold mine just waiting to be better monetized. Go DK, TL, SK, QL!
   
   
2. Among the smaller players, LinkedIn has made amazing, solid progress in the past 12 months, and is currently dominant in this group. Given this trajectory, it's arguable that LinkedIn's growth is primarily utility-driven---the steadiest source of growth.
   
   
3. Ning, the network of networks player, has probably the steadiest and most predictable growth, and appears set to overtake Meebo within a few months. This growth pattern is similar to LinkedIn's.
   
   
4. Twitter's growth comes in spurts. This is not to surprising for a new player coming from a low base---it would be interesting to watch if Twitter growth becomes more utility-driven than press/buzz-driven.
   
   
5. Meebo's growth appears to have slowed, in % terms. I realize I'm looking at just US data, and have used traffic to meebo.com as a 1/5 proxy for all the chat room activities. But it does stand to reason that as one of the larger members of this grouping, growth rate is slower.
   

And now we're looking at the same visualization---free to draw our own observations---and we could be collaborating on the same Google Spreadsheet. In real time. The tool is there. Use it.

Going a bit off-track (I did quantitative finance in a former life), I decided to try the "Piles (of money)" gadget. This time I compared the monetization power of Google and Yahoo. I defined a metric based on free cash flow per unique user per month. In the 08Q1 comparison below, you can see that Google produces $2.46 free cash flow per user per month, where Yahoo does just $0.76/user-month. The trend in the past 5 quarters is shown in the line-graph gadget below---again suggesting that Yahoo has quite of bit of headroom to improve monetization of its traffic.

This is simplifying things a bit, since there are fundamental differences in monetizing search traffic (intent) vs. destination traffic (content/behavior). Still, in the aggregate, this picture suggests that there is plenty of potential for Yahoo, e.g., to return to its engineering roots and be allowed to execute things like Panama and realize the true potential of its audience reach.

Good data coupled with excellent exploration and collaboration tools will increase the intelligence of teams and improve decision making. I intend to push the use of these tools extensively at Bluepulse, whether it's for market projections, product planning, software or production engineering, support, or other functions.