Lies, damned lies, and graphs

September 8, 2008 7:19 PM

Graph your life at MIT's Mycrocosm. Simple interface. Interesting potential. Worrying about. Freelance: No Idea What the Hell Is Going On. Food and Liquid Consumption. Also allows for sharing datasets with other users.
posted by artifarce (10 comments total)

You can see a similar concept at work in this amusing Mefi post.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:42 PM on September 8, 2008

Cool idea but don't show these graphs to Stephen Few. They do a horrible job of conveying the information they supposedly represent. Worrying about is graphed as a line graph? What is the graph actually supposed to represent? Can I not click on the actual graph to get a legend or something? What are those numbers on the left? Percentage of time spent worrying? Number of minutes spent worrying? Number of ulcers caused by worrying about? I mean it's just useless really. The other graphs linked are as bad or worse.

Maybe I don't get the point of the site.

</rant>

is there no way to link directly to a single graph???
posted by kurmbox at 8:57 PM on September 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Daytum is another service that does the same thing. It's being developed by the dude that does those awesome year in review infographics heavy reports.
posted by chunking express at 9:12 PM on September 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

And people are picking the wrong graphs to display their data. You can't fault mycrocosm for that. Daytum lets you link to individual graphs. Mycrocosm has all sorts of weird issues with usability, so I didn't get very far using it. Both sites seem handy if there is some weird thing you want to track in your life -- and don't want to use a pad and paper.
posted by chunking express at 9:18 PM on September 8, 2008

I just got my Daytum account a few days ago. It's very slick, very Web2.0 (or whatever number we're up to these days).
posted by bjrn at 12:59 AM on September 9, 2008

kurmbox: link to a single graph by clicking the grey plus sign by each graph. I agree, there's a few usability issues.
posted by artifarce at 4:17 AM on September 9, 2008

Sweet, that freelance one is me. I think Mycrocosm has a long way to go, but as a regular user, I've found it ridiculously easy to add things to. I think it's pretty great if you're not focused on sharing it too much (ie only wanting to show one graph, wanting it to be super-pretty).
posted by dougunderscorenelso at 5:33 AM on September 9, 2008

Mycrocosm's graphs are rendered by the Google graphing service.
posted by Nelson at 6:51 AM on September 9, 2008

This is really cool.
posted by nthdegx at 9:24 AM on September 9, 2008

Oh, wonderful, I am signing the hell up.
posted by zusty at 9:56 PM on September 10, 2008