Comments on: Google Chart API

Google Chart API

scottreynen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:53:25 -0800

Google's new Chart API makes images of various charts based entirely on URLs. There's no key required, so it's very easy to start adding charts to the 86% of statistics we're making up. As a starting point for chart play, MetaFilter as a chart.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:56:40 -0800

Maybe Matt will allow us to embed charts in comments in lieu of the IMG tag.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:57:23 -0800

Is "chart play" some sort of economist fetish?

By: Pastabagel

Pastabagel — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 11:59:37 -0800

Pie is seven times better than cake.

By: aubilenon

aubilenon — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:04:45 -0800

Pastabagel: More research is required.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:07:17 -0800

Oh damn. Oh heck yes.

By: brain_drain

brain_drain — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:11:30 -0800

I think I just charted goatse.

By: jrishel

jrishel — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:11:43 -0800

oh noes. venn diagrams

By: ravelite

ravelite — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:11:50 -0800

This is good for Sparklines on the web.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:12:28 -0800

An oldie but goodie: Percentage of chart which looks like Pac-Man

By: desjardins

desjardins — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:16:47 -0800

I'm too stupid to muck around with the code, but this looks fun.

By: Skorgu

Skorgu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:24:59 -0800

Come on mat, you know you want to allow special-case IMG tags if they come from google.

By: chlorus

chlorus — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:25:10 -0800

If it's stupid and Google does it, people will like it.

By: empath

empath — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:27:40 -0800

You think this is stupid? It's fucking brilliant. Now we don't have to use ugly crystal reports.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:29:17 -0800

What's the reverse of a favorite? Because clorus gets one of those.

By: kalessin

kalessin — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:31:44 -0800

I think it's called an ignorance.

By: xthlc

xthlc — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:33:27 -0800

These are great. I saw an internal ad for them posted on a wall at Google when I visited last spring, and I was hoping they'd release them publicly. They're a simple, lightweight, lovely way to see your data. Putting the data in the URL is a great idea, since it will also behave properly w.r.t. browser cacheing. The one potential problem is IE's short limit on URL length, which is 2048 characters in the path portion.

By: xthlc

xthlc — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:34:55 -0800

Also, sadly, you will probably still have to use crystal reports, unless your company is cool with sending proprietary data in cleartext over the internets to Google.

By: chlorus

chlorus — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:37:46 -0800

See? Stupid.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:39:51 -0800

Hm, true. My company doesn't want everyone and their mother to know that in the past six months, something has gone 12, 14, 22, 31, 78, and then 64.

By: rooftop secrets

rooftop secrets — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:41:21 -0800

What These Charts Will Be Used For On Metafilter

By: Plutor

Plutor — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:42:02 -0800

Like so.

By: zennie

zennie — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:46:49 -0800

You can call it stupid if that makes you feel better, but it's still a dang nifty toy.

By: CitrusFreak12

CitrusFreak12 — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:48:56 -0800

I'm confused, what is this a chart of? Someone please explain?

By: smackfu

smackfu — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:56:20 -0800

I'm surprised they don't limit it to people who have pre-registered, like they do with the Google Maps API.

By: kalessin

kalessin — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:56:21 -0800

Your mom's head height during a recent visit to your local football team's locker room?

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:56:32 -0800

They encode the chart values as letters, so random sentences turn into line charts.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:59:19 -0800

> Also, sadly, you will probably still have to use crystal reports, unless your company is cool with sending proprietary data in cleartext over the internets to Google. Dude. Hash the data, send it to Google, make a chart, send the URL to staff with the hash key. Have them OCR the chart to generate the source data, put the data into Excel, and generate the chart. SIMPLE.

By: empath

empath — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:59:33 -0800

citrus: each datapoint is a letter, with A at the bottom and Z at the top.

By: Artw

Artw — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:05:09 -0800

This is stupid brilliant! I forsee all kinds of mash-up fun.

By: gleuschk

gleuschk — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:05:12 -0800

citrus: like so.

By: blue_beetle

blue_beetle — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:18:42 -0800

Kent: Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent? Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that. Kent: I see. Well, what do you say to the accusation that your group has been causing more crimes than it's been preventing? Homer: [amused] Oh, Kent, I'd be lying if I said my men weren't committing crimes. Kent: [pause] Well, touche'. [Insert chart here]

By: xthlc

xthlc — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:23:24 -0800

I am looking most forward to this new tool elevating our Internet discourse on the Internet.

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:34:23 -0800

This is good for Sparklines on the web. You know I have never ever seen a sparkline except in the context of this Tufte guy yakking about how great they are or someone yakking about how great Tufte is. If I wasn't such a lazy bitch I'd make a chart of it.

By: scottreynen

scottreynen — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:36:55 -0800

You know I have never ever seen a sparkline except in the context of this Tufte guy yakking about how great they are You may just have not noticed the ones you've seen, because they don't require you to stop and think about them, which is why they're good.

By: nihlton

nihlton — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:40:13 -0800

ok, go to converting these please http://indexed.blogspot.com/

By: nihlton

nihlton — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:44:27 -0800

if you got beef....

By: xthlc

xthlc — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:45:45 -0800

You know I have never ever seen a sparkline except in the context of this Tufte guy yakking about how great they are One reason for that is that sparklines, as tufte envisioned them, are hard to make with today's publishing tools. You have to get something that looks right at a small size and inline it into your document. They're seldom worth the effort for something so throwaway. The nice thing about the Google Chart API is that making a sparkline is as simple as typing a URL in your blog post (OK, with all kinds of arcane codes). A case in point The thing I find interesting about this is that most people, today, place a great deal of unconscious weight on charts. They're far more likely to believe you when you show them a pretty chart of something than when you simply state facts baldly. When it becomes just as easy to lie with charts on the Internet as it is with text, will it make people more skeptical of visualization per se? I hope so.

By: jedicus

jedicus — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:47:34 -0800

Needs error bars, but otherwise very nice.

By: phearlez

phearlez — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:08:56 -0800

~~What These Charts Will Be Used For On~~ Metafilter Fixed that for ya. In both places.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:23:34 -0800

> You may just have not noticed the ones you've seen, because they don't require you to stop and think about them, which is why they're good. In which case they're too small to see, because I've never seen them used outside of HCI/UX blogs either. It'd be neat if they were used more broadly, maybe as the proxy for a real chart that appears when the sparkline is clicked. The challenge of making implementation easy is half the battle - the other half is convincing people that they should go through the effort of generating a cluster of data and manually adding it to their blog to make a crooked line 14 pixels tall. Which is not to say using the Google Chart API is any easier. But at least, at the end of it, the chart can be labeled.

By: oncogenesis

oncogenesis — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:33:38 -0800

The chart-as-URI idea is cool, but the REST interface design is disappointingly crufty. A = 0 and 0 = 52? WTF?! What Google should do next is provide a form through which you can post your raw data and have the byzantine chart URI pop out on the other end.

By: monocyte

monocyte — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:06:00 -0800

Where are the error bars?

By: DU

DU — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:23:20 -0800

omg omg omgomgomgomgomgomg I think I just came in my pants a little.

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:26:21 -0800

Where are the error bars? GOOGLE DOES NOT MAKE MISTAKES

By: DU

DU — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:41:14 -0800

What Google should do next is provide a form through which you can post your raw data and have the byzantine chart URI pop out on the other end. What does the "P" in "API" stand for again?

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:06:54 -0800

"Pronto", as in "make it snappy, Brin".

By: mullingitover

mullingitover — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:31:35 -0800

This is a great use for rap represented in charts and graphs.

By: quin

quin — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:55:25 -0800

What does the "P" in "API" stand for again? Pugilist? Well, it should.

By: nakedcodemonkey

nakedcodemonkey — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:50:33 -0800

Google Analytics uses sparklines heavily, and quite useful.

By: whir

whir — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:20:03 -0800

rap represented in charts and graphs Oh my god. That's completely frickin' awesome.

By: rajbot

rajbot — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 00:35:36 -0800

What Google should do next is provide a form through which you can post your raw data and have the byzantine chart URI pop out on the other end. I made a simple frontend here, that right now works only for pie charts.

By: rajbot

rajbot — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:04:19 -0800

Ok, I added Line, Bar, and 3D pie charts too. Have fun!

By: DU

DU — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:19:52 -0800

The Venn diagrams could use a little work. Actually, the whole thing could, but in particular how do I label the overlapped areas in a venn?

By: tmcw

tmcw — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 21:39:54 -0800

Eh, this is something that anyone can do with open source libraries. So far those libraries have been ugly because people haven't cared about defaults and have come from engineering & business backgrounds (and thus have no eye for design), but that's just a matter of getting great defaults. The Google service will probably inspire lots of gpl workalikes, and that's a good thing, since the idea of every website partially relying on Google for essential features is both bad and creepy.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:00:23 -0800

The libraries also tend to be a pain to install, because they inevitably have external graphic library dependencies. And the graphic libraries are inevitably written in C, not Perl or Python or whatever, so you need to get them to compile first. On a shared web server, this can be a major hassle. I see the appeal of the Google API.

By: tmcw

tmcw — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 10:37:04 -0800

They can be a pain to install, sure. PyCha looks like it'll be for VPN/dedicated servers only. But the PHP libraries almost all depend on GD, which is on 95% on hosts with PHP on them. In fact, I haven't seen one not written with GD so far.

By: Plutor

Plutor — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 06:06:19 -0800

If you have a lot of charts and a lot of traffic, there's also the appeal of using Google's immense server farm instead of your own cycles. It's also one fewer application/library to watch for security vulnerabilities or stability bugs (yes, GD has had them). Also, not everyone can bear to work with PHP.