I was talking the other day with a guy who knows his way around business on the internet. Not his first rodeo. I was pitching our vision here at newsmango.

And he asked me one of those questions that’s supposed to be a stumper: “If visualization is so cool, why hasn’t it already gained traction?”

It’s a good question really. I didn’t have a pat answer at the time, which is odd, since it’s something I’ve thought about at considerable length. I think I essentially mumbled something about amazing things happening with javascript. Plus look at HTML5 on the horizon. Well, that didn’t cut the mustard.

So he rescued me. “It has succeeded—and wildly. It’s games, and it’s Flash.” he said. “That should be your answer.” He went on to talk about the size of the market—bigger than the movie industry, if I recall. And he ticked off YouTube and other major operations using Flash.

Now that I’ve had a chance to collect my thoughts, however, I’m ready to say: You’re half right. Also: so was I.

But first I want to circle back. In general, the question “why hasn’t X already happened?” is often too clever by half. Taken to its extreme, it would force us into all kinds of awkward denials, like the plausibility of a twenty-dollar bill ever lying on the sidewalk, ready for you to find—because somebody would have picked it up! The point is that—every once in a while—irrational things happen, like this digression perhaps.

Anyhow. My interlocutor made two separate claims, and both were half right. Sure, Flash has deep and broad penetration into the market. But the exceptions are important, as Fred Wilson found out from his commenters a few months ago. “I got completely and totally trashed in that discussion and rightly so,” Fred later wrote, “as I suggested that Flash is open, which it is not, and missed out on the trend toward HTML5 based solutions.”

But my interlocutor’s claim about video games is more interesting. He’s correct, of course, that games are an established success story for visualization and graphics. Nevertheless, they’re not the perfect precedent for us. Why? Because the graphics in video games are ends in themselves.

I think it’s true that, where web services have found compelling ends-in-themselves reasons for graphics or serious visualizations of data, they have succeeded. But that’s only trivially true because games are in fact the only example that comes to mind.

I say “web services” because there are fantastic one-off visualizations done by organizations like the New York Times. Nevertheless, efforts like the Times’s vizlab—which, by my lights, are incredibly cool and wildly promising—haven’t blown up yet. (This list of such efforts, and similar efforts, is too long to attempt.)

For newsmango, however, the visualizations are just a means to an end. While cool by themselves, our visualizations are mostly just an interface to the news, which is text and will be for a long time.¹ The visualizations aren’t the point. A better kind of search and information discovery is the point.

And that’s the thing really. Visualization has captivated the mind. We all think about it so romantically. We end up with projects focused on it. Consider this monstrosity, called Spectra, brought to you by MSNBC. Also, silobreaker isn’t exactly user-friendly. Or consider even Stamen’s work with Digg. It’s beautiful stuff, but sort of the way a lava lamp is beautiful. It gets nothing done. The examples are endless.

It’s time to put visualization to work—to make it a better means to a highly desired end: news the way we love it. And along the way, if it’s beautiful or reveals powerful patterns in immense data sets, that would be an awesome bonus.

¹ Text is atemporal, while audio and video require one to rewind and fast-forward, so scanning and non-linear consumption are much, much more difficult.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 4:16 am and is filed under Visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.