I still remember my childhood days that were full of joyful moments coming without any smart phones or similar technical appliances. Yet, it is hard to believe how soon technology has captivated the world over. Not a single moment passes by when we aren’t hooked on to our iPod or lazing around with an X-box or even chatting over the phone.
This visualization depicts just how expeditiously social media has surrounded everything we know about. Data shown here only goes on to prove the basic claim of how majority of our time is spent over the wire. This visualization shows all popular social media platforms and their impact on us. One can easily feel the current numbers to have increased at a rapid pace and even though they increase day by day yet it is impossible for anyone to foresee or predict such numbers for the future.
What I really like in this visualization is how quickly it gives you a glimpse of 16 popular applications and how vast they have become today. Most of us have been using such apps for quite some time now while forgetting just how much everyone around us are equally hooked onto them as well. Hence, talking about such huge numbers enlightens us to see the impact internet in general has over us.
Despite getting the message loud and clear it still lacks a few fundamentals. Firstly, there should be additional numbers to show the percent increase in users from last year that goes on to help us understand the pace of change. Moreover, it could also have shown the country where each app is most popular in, giving us an insight as to how different apps are favored by different cultures and what may become a trend for the future. These numbers are certainly the average usage of each app computed in a minute however, it could have been more useful had they differentiated it with respect to different times of the day just to follow what time suits most people the best. Also, real-time updating of these numbers, even though it is quite a tough task to achieve, would have given a new depth to this dashboard.
To conclude, we can see how visualization concepts and tools can be used to depict anything in a powerful manner. Users should not only be able to make sense of the message being delivered but also use different measures to extract meaning out of each dashboard.
http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2009/12/07/50-excellent-scholarly-literary-criticism-blogs/