f8, this year’s Facebook Developer Conference was filled with new announcements. Beside the controversial unified open graph and the new social plugins there were a few things that caught my eye.

Keynote slides

The keynote slides featured illustrations using the open graph as a metaphor to display some of Facebook’s application icons. It took me some time to find the source of the visualizations but finally I found out about the involvement of Bernard Barry. He describes the work behind the illustrations as follows:

We started working on it in January talking with Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Cox about the conceptual direction and what they wanted to communicate. We ended up talking a lot about personal identity and the transformative power of a unified open graph of the world. […] We spent a lot of time thinking about how we could communicate the power of the graph through imagery, we wanted show that the graph is everywhere and can be everything.

f8 Presence

With an experiment from the Facebook Hackaton, the people behind the event took the concept of check-ins one step further. Using near field technology they were able to publish interactions directly to Facebook. Everett Katigbak from the Facebook design team explaines:

Facebook Presence is an experiment with RFID technology integrated with the Facebook platform. Attendees would link the tags with their Facebook accounts and interact with different kiosks to publish various interactions back to their profile. The idea is to bring Facebook into the real world and create a lightweight way to share information with your friends.

The collected data was then used to power a huge 80′ x 20′ video wall showing the path of people from reader to reader as well as a schedule of upcoming events. Lee Byron replicated the well-known visualization from the movie War Games where a computer would plays Tic Tac Toe agains itself and never wins.

The hard facts are given: A team has 11 players, the ball is round and a match takes 90 minutes. But what happens in between? We’ve compiled a list of applications and visualization that strive to provide insights into the FIFA World Cup 2010.

World Cup 2010 Calendar

The World Cup 2010 Calendar by MARCA.com is an interactive schedule for the tournament. You can access information by national team, group, stage, stadium, city or date. Once you hover over a wedge, June 14th for example, you see all the matches that take place on that day (Go Cameroon!). The visualization does not provide any deeper insight that the end result but the matches are linked to the coverage on MARCA.com.

2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa Game Tracker

Similar to the above mentioned schedule is the Game Tracker by Bristol based digital design studio Positive. It shows the upcoming game dates and results for past matches. The visualization is built in Flash and you rotate the circular schedule with simple drag & drop gestures. Again, not much insights about the matches, players or teams.

FIFA World Cup 2010

VisualSports has created a dedicated page for the World Cup matches. Every match for the group stage can be found in a table sorted by grouping. You can analyze the past matches with a visualization showing all cards, shots and substitutions that happened.

Twitter.com/worldcup

Another dedicated page comes from Twitter: You can “view” past and upcoming matches, which means that you get two parallel Twitter timelines with mentions of the playing teams. Honestly I don’t get much information out of this one.

Total Football 2010

With Total Footbal 2010 by Colm McMullan match analysis comes to the iPhone. For current and past matches the application offers different visualizations to dive into the data. The visualizations show information like the influence of each player, passes, placements of shots, tackles, clearances, fouls and so on. All match data updates in real-time. Of course the usual match stats like goalscorers, substitutions or cards are included as well.

World Cup Data Visualiser

The London based design & development studio Mint Digital comes this concept for an iPad application. It combines the football data from Picklivewith fun and intuitive analysis tools. For example, it allows you to compare cumulatively, or per match, all footballers in the World Cup across a variety of stats like goals, shoots on target, tackles and more. I haven’t found anything about the progress of this but they seem to have a working version of their Hamlock framework without the need of Flash which is apparently a necessity to run in on the iPad. See more images onFlickr.com.

World Cup 2010 Twitter Replay

The Guardian also leverages Twitter data to create the World Cup 2010 Twitter Replay application. It’s basically a timeline based visualization that represents Twitter hashtags as a bubble chart. On the timeline you can see important actions during the game like cards and substitutions.

Live World Cup Match Tracker

The New York Times uses a custom Flash application to support coverage of past matches. It’s a small little widget but filled with important information. A match can be analyzed in different ways to focus on ball posession (bubble chart), passes (lines) and area of play (heatmap). Shots are shown as cicles below the timeline. You can skip through the whole game by switching between notable actions. I think the NYT wins this round in regard of data density (and in my opinion also in regard of visual aesthetics).

I believe there are tons of other visualizations out there — if you come across something interesting, please let me know.

Via Infosthetics & FlowingData

Nike Basketball partnered up with the good folks from Stamen to create a new visualization for the NBA Playoffs. Post-season Twitter Playoffs compares the competing teams based on how many times their name is mentioned in the Twittersphere.

Matchup

Matchup displays the current state of affairs as the height of the square representing the team. You can switch between scaling each game independently or in regard to the whole league.

Bracket

Bracket shows the complete playoff tree with the winner / loser for each game. Again, the amount of Tweets per team decides who moves on and who is eliminated.

In addition theres a detail page for each team with the recent Tweets in chronological order and the possibility to cheer for your favourite team. The smart thing for Nike here is that each detail page contains links to their Player profiles, team collection and news articles. this drives traffic back to the official Nike basketball site.

I am once again happy to see such good work coming from Stamen who seems to attract more and more of the big clients lately. From a business point of view, I furthermore enjoy the cross-selling (sorry for that term) ideas implemented in this application.

Let us know your opinion in the comments.

For the 52nd Annual GRAMMY® Awards the Recording Academy® and TBWA put more focus on the voice of the fans than their eyes or ears. In addition to the regular advertising campaign the put up a website and a visualization that let’s the fans speak up. Portraits of the nominated artists composed entirely of real-time, fan-generated YouTube, Twitter and Flickr postings. Furthermore the FanBuzz Visualizer acts as a barometer of fandom on the Web in real time. The Visualizer is powered with the real-time tracking technology of Visible Technologies.

I appreciate the integration of data visualization in ad campaigns and would highly underline its importance in tracking social media but the representation and the interaction model of the Visualizer seem too limited. The multimedia-driven main application with its immersive interface is better suited for the target audience in my opinion.

WE’RE ALL FANS – The 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards

See the Dashboard for yourself