There is a chart called “Evolution of Privacy on Facebook” going around on the web. The chart made by Matt Mckeon, a developer in IBM’s visual communications lab has created quite a stir in the interwebs. You can a small animated version of that chart below:
While Matt made a few mistakes with the chart, I think this is a stunning way to depict how facebook privacy policies have changed since 2005.
(How to read the above chart: It is radar-like chart, with logarithmic scale for spoke axis. The concentric circles depict number of people – inner most is you, then your friends, friends’ friends, entire facebook and entire internet. Privacy is measured on 9 areas – Name, Picture, Demographics, Extended Profile Data, Friends, Networks, Wall posts, Photos, Likes of you. A portion of the radar is shaded blue if that information is available to that portion by default.
For eg. in 2005 what you liked (likes) is known only to you. But, by 2010 entire internet can know what you liked.
Also, the data is based on Matt’s observations. More…)
I liked this chart and challenged myself to build the same in excel. Then as I was exploring the data (hidden inside the source code of his visualization), I had a better idea. “Why not make a panel chart“.
So I made this,
Evolution of Privacy Policies on Facebook
[click here for a larger version]
How to read this chart?
Each panel depicts how privacy policies have changed for one area of privacy since 2005 to 2010. So, for eg. if you are looking at the “Name” panel,
- Your Name was visible only to 1000 people in 2005 but in 2010, Entire internet (1.8 Billion) can see your name on Facebook.
- The dull gray color portion shows entire Internet population (it grew from 1B in 2005 to 1.8B in 2010).
- Red color portion shows how much of internet population can get your data from Facebook.
- The y-axis is log 10 scale, meaning each increment in y-axis value is actually 10 times more than previous value.
- The 3 lines indicate your friends, network and entire face book users respectively. Facebook users is shown on top in black color.
How is this chart made?
- After downloading the source code of original visualization by Matt, I just copied the data points from code to excel.
- Then I cleaned and transposed the data so that area charts can be made.
- The chart panels are combo-charts with both areas (red and gray portions) and lines (facebook, network, friend counts).
- Once made the first chart, I just duplicated it 8 more times and changed source points. (press CTRL+D to duplicate).
- A little bit of alignment and formatting to make it look clean and simple. [chart alignment tip].
Known issues in this chart:
- The horizontal axis (dates) are not equally spaced. The measurement times and accuracy are unknown.
- I am not 100% sure if areas are a good way to depict such data. But they seem ok to me.
Download the Excel File:
Click here to download the excel file [Excel 2007 version here] with facebook privacy policies excel panel chart. Play with it a bit to understand how it works.
How would you improve or visualize such data?
I used time as the axis and privacy areas as panels since the message is “how privacy policies have changed since 2005”. But I am sure you would love to explore this data in a different way. Go ahead and get the download file and make your own charts. Then share them using comments.
Also, suggest alterations or your impressions on this chart. Discuss.
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.