Qwiki – the information experience
Some people say we are just at the beginning of a new time with a data driven world. the internet enabled us to make all sorts of data public, websites like wikipedia and facebook collect unbelievable amount of information and even governments have started to put their data online. not to image what will happen once the world wide mobile sensor network comes alive (your cellphone :D)
Mint.com is a website that keeps track of your daily debit and credit card spendings, but it also aggregates data from its 4 million users. They just opened up their data to the public. here is the announcement and you can try it yourself on http://data.mint.com/
We’ve already seen how Mint data can be used to tell stories about consumer spending and the economy. Now, whenever you want to know which businesses are trending or which bar is buzzing, you can do so yourself.
The real challenge however is how to tell people about this data, make it available so its easy to understand and use for everybody. and that exactly why we need Interaction Designers. Data Visualization is just the first step… and that’s why I was so fascinated by Qwiki. On Qwiki you search for something and it will tell you about it. It sounds a bit lame, but actually its amazing. it aggregates data from different sources and visualizes everything that it is talking about. just check it out… some examples are already online (its still in alpha). and eventually you will be a able to just search for anything on Qwiki.
