Byline, our new blog about data
One of the things we were most excited about on launching Timetric was…
…on the face of it, pretty simple: putting data in front of you which up to now has been the preserve of academics, businessmen, economists and journalists. But raw data isn’t enough: it has to be data in a form where you can do something with it, and where you can all build on it.
We’ve started a new blog, Byline, to talk about the data behind the stories.
The technical posts will stay over here – on here, we’ll talk about Timetric itself, its APIs, new features, and some of the really great things people are beginning to build on top of the platform. But if you’re after the data in the news, Byline’s the place to go. We’ve kicked off with some inflation data from everyone’s favourite economy-to-compare-things-to, Japan in the 1990s; we’ll also be pointing to the data you all upload to Timetric, and the best writing around the web using our data.
Have a look!
New search and new graphs!
We’ve just added a couple of new features to Timetric which we think you’ll find useful. Up until now, it’s been a bit tricky to get a quick overview of the data in an area; you’ve needed to save all the series to your dashboard individually before you could plot them against each other – which meant you had to be logged in! – and, on top of that, the different sorts of search we had (by tag and by free-text) weren’t as well integrated as they could have been.
Well, we’ve changed all that.
Take employment data as an example:
Search results for "Employment" on Timetric
Two big changes here – firstly, there are sparklines, so you can get a feel for all the data in front of you immediately; secondly, you now get all the relevant tags at the top of the page on every search result, so you can immediately start filtering through the search results to find what you’re interested in. Let’s say that’s the utilities sector.
The stars on the right here, if you’re logged in, immediately save series to your dashboard; they’re gold for each series you’re already watching. But the bigger change is on the left; if you check the series you’re interested in…
Selecting series in Timetric search results
and then hit “Overlay” or “Versus”, which you’ll find at the start and end of the search results page:
you can start making plots straight from search results.
Transportation employment's much more seasonal in Alaska than in Alabama.
You can even get the embed code to put a graph into your blog straight from there:
And that gives us a chance to mention another new feature which a few of you’ve been asking for – if you hover your mouse over the points in this graph, you’ll see each measurement in the scatter plot labelled with the time it comes from.
The big changes to graphing here are actually under the covers, though: after this, we’ll be able to make some really exciting improvements in the near future.
Improved Embedding
Amongst the changes we made to Timetric at the start of this week were some improvements to our embeddable plots. Infosthetics made a couple of requests for features that we had planned, but didn’t have time to implement before our public beta.
We aim to please, so now we display the title of the series on the vertical axis, and there’s a handy link back to the series on timetric.com.
The only problem is that getting this to work required a couple of changes to the embed codes you paste into your blog. New embeds will get this automatically, but if you’ve got any existing graphs embedded in your site, you’ll need to re-embed them using the new code to see these changes. We’ll continue to support the old style indefinitely, so don’t worry if you don’t feel like updating!
One week in
Well, that was some first few days. There’s been a lot going on.
It’s been great to see people coming to Timetric and starting to build things we’d have never expected. By the way, hello to the readers of the Freakonomics blog at the New York Times! It’s great to see you all here, and we’d love to hear what you think.
On the subject of newspapers, the Guardian Open Platform launched today, and it’s fantastic. As a bit of a celebration, we’ve taken some of the data they’ve published and brought it into Timetric – the Guardian/ICM UK voting-intentions poll back to 1984…
(The Guardian/ICM UK poll: the Conservatives are in blue, Labour in red, the Liberal Democrats in yellow).
Hopefully, there’ll be some interesting correlations to draw from this data with, for example, the economic and crime statistics we already have on Timetric. We’ll be importing more of the data the Guardian are publishing when we get the chance – there’s some fantastic stuff there.
Public beta!
We’re very, very pleased to announce that Timetric is now in public beta!
(What, you’re still here? Go sign up.).
There’s a press release on our company website, if you’re looking for something a bit more formal, but over here, we’d just like to say thank you, and we hope you like our work — and if you’ve got any feedback, please let us know.