The data visualization geek behind Facebooks Timeline

We learned a lot about about two peoples lives during Facebooks f8 keynote on Thursday: Mark Zuckerberg and Nicholas Felton. Zuck showed off photos of his dog and his childhood to demonstrate the companys new Timeline feature, which made sense. But why wasFacebooks VP of product management Chris Cox talking so much about Feltons life, elaborating some ten minutes about how Felton really loved to collect data that would bore most other people? And who the heck is Nicholas Felton?

In short, hes the god of data visualization. Feltons work has been featured in Wired, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Hes gotten props for turning unwieldy things like all the things that have been written about on Wikipedia or abstract concepts like the economy of ideas into compelling infographics. But hes probably best known for the mundane aspects of his everyday life. Like the music he listens to and the kind of booze he drinks.

The kind of music Nicholas Felton listened to in 2008 to, as visualized by Nicholas Felton.

The reason for that is that Felton has been turning this kind of data into annual reports about his own life and the life of people close to him ever since 2005. These annual reports contain beautiful data visualizations, which is ! why Cox called them works of art on stage on Thursday.

However, the reports also provide interesting clues on how to utilize and get value out of data that others would simply discard, which is exactly what Facebooks new Timeline feature is about. When working on this, Facebook had to decide how to make sense of a persons life, how to summarize some behavior and feature other events. No wonder they turned to Felton for advice. The data visualization expert was hired by Facebook in April and on Thursday, it looked like this key hire more than paid off.

Image courtesy of (CC-BY-SA) Flickr user poptech.

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