Introducing the Google Visualization API
By Nir
Bar-Lev, Product ManagerWe spend a fair amount of time on
data display and visualization projects at Google, and we have found that the "last mile" of
these projects tend to become full projects in and of themselves.
Thus
when we acquired
Gapminder last year, we were excited by the opportunity to use
Gapminder's powerful visualization techniques to bring new life and usefulness to Google
datasets. And we were not alone -- the web is home to a vibrant community of developers who
build amazing visualization applications.
With the community in mind,
we're please to introduce the
Google Visualization
API, which is designed to make it easier for a wide audience to make use of advanced
visualization technology, and do so in a way that makes it quick and easy to integrate with
new visualizations.
There are a two key elements here: simplicity and
ubiquity. We hope we nailed the first, but of course we want to hear
your feedback on
that. The second will take more time, but we hope we're on the right path. We're releasing
this API at an early stage so we can get continuous feedback and be sure we're building it the
right way.
This launch is in tandem and in cooperation with the Google
Docs team, who
just
announced support for gadgets and the Visualization API in spreadsheets. This
includes a set of gadgets created by Google and several other companies, including some that
add pivoting, grouping, and other new functionality to your spreadsheets. You can see all of
those in our 'featured' list within the
visualization
gallery, which includes the
Gapminder
Motion Chart that has proven especially popular among within Google.
We hope you're as excited about the Google Visualization API as we are --
please be sure to
tell
us what you think. We'll also be at
Google I/O on May 28-29 for deeper
discussions about the API or visualization techniques in general.
