It takes various data points to help Londoners understand where they can live if they want to commute to work in a certain time. The maps produced can be altered depending on house prices and also with how beautiful people think the area is.

A lot of data visualization exercises on the web are pretty but not particularly useful. This mashup represents the transcendent web at it’s best – a way of seeing the world that could not have existed even five years ago.

A lot of people fail to see the value of Twitter:

“Why should I care what my friend, Dan had for breakfast?”

But this is overlooking the power of a service that is becoming more and more important and valuable. As the Twitter network grows, so does it’s power and reach. With that growth come a number of important benefits:

1. Smart Businesses use Twitter as an instantaneous (if unscientific) feedback mechanism. Let’s say you owned a travel web site and you released a new rating feature. Ask your Twitter followers – it’s an instant focus group.
2. While Google is great for search, the millions of Twitter followers can act like a human-powered answer machine. Let’s suppose you want to know the best bottle of red wine to go with filet mignon. Google is going to struggle with this. Somewhere in your network of Twitter followers, their followers or their followers followers, is a carnivorous wine expert who can ask followup questions and provide the best possible answer.
3. While Google is undoubtable powerful, it’s not live. Someone has to create a page and upload it. Then Google has to index it. All of this takes time. Searching Twitter is instantaneous. This explains why news stories such as the Hudson River Plane Crash on January 15 2009 and heroic pilot Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, show up on Twitter first. 
4. If you use an ‘Power Twitter’ application like TweetDeck to isolate groups of people you follow that are all interested in the same thing (i.e. Web Design, Cycling, Tube Socks, etc), chances are that if they decide to ‘retweet’ something it’s probably going to interest you. It’s a human filter for the internet.

Look at the rising number of unique visitors to Twitter Search. According to Compete.com, site traffic rose 24% in the month of April 2009 alone. Habits are beginning to shift and ‘live’ or ‘social searching’ is taking off. More and more people are crowdsourcing the answers to their questions and bypassing Google entirely. It will be interesting to see how services like FriendFeed and Aardvark do in the face of this.

 photo credit: Search Engine People Blog

In his 2009 SXSW Presentation, “Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong“, Dan Willis talks about the Transcendent Web and the idea that tomorrow’s web sites will no longer be billboards but instead will be data aggregators.

“The popularity of mashups (the combination of data from more than one source into a single integrated tool) will continue to grow throughout the century. Content from a wide variety of sources will flow like water into vessels designed for a wide variety of purposes to be displayed by a wide variety of devices. Eventually, most Web sites will likely become a type of mashup themselves.”

Dan Willis, Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong

Willis points to the example of Flickrvision, one of “why didn’t I think of that?” ideas where Flickr photos are overlaid onto Google Maps as they are posted. This creates a voyeuristic insight into lives of random photographers around the globe. Other (more complex) examples include Mapdango, a web site that acts like the crazed 21st century offspring of an Atlas and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Search for a place like “Boulder, Colorado” and Mapdango will bring together relevant information from Google Maps, YouTube, Wikipedia, Eventful, WeatherBug, Google, Panoramio and Amazon.

What happens then when we take these ideas and apply them to disaster relief or environmental issues? It’s not to hard to imagine a web site that pulls data from Flickr and Twitter and lays it over Google Maps to show where humanitarian travesties are taking place or where ecological hotspots exist. We know from the 7 July 2005 bombings in London that citizen journalists provided the initial coverage of that event as it was happening. Once a site that pulls all of this data together breaks through, it can use Twitter, Facebook, AllTop, Blog Widgets etc to greatly magnify the impact of it’s efforts.

A fully-realized web is emerging, one that goes beyond the static web pages rooted in print design. As web 2.0 matures, charities and causes will be able to leverage community and crowdsourcing to both uncover issues and publicize their efforts at solving them.

At Stormlab, we hope to be a part of this revolution.