A group of Facebook engineers – Jack Lindamood, Kevin Der and Dan Weatherford – have created a small project called Palantir at a Facebook Hackathon event. The project is named after The palantír of Orthanc, a crystal ball-like object from The Lord Of The Rings (yep, they’re nerds).
Anyway, it’s a video of the earth showing Facebook activity visually and geographically. One view shows activity as dots of light that flow upward. Another view shows connections between people around the globe as it occurs. The images above show a little of it, but you really have to see the video to appreciate it. You can see it here.
Facebook says they are strongly considering productizing this, but for now it isn’t on the roadmap. If they do go forward with it, presumably you’ll be able to watch friend connections happening all over the world.
Data Visualization is the next big thing with data moving into the cloud, Consumer data followed by Enterprise data will be moving into the cloud and there will be huge requirement for such visualization apis.
Praveen
http://spraveen...o.blogspot.com/
This is such OLD stuff, Google has a this in there office since 2004. Wow, I am so impress that a facebook employee saw that at google and duplicated it. Double WOW.
I wonder what else facebook stole from google’s home office?
PS the one at the google office is way cooler as it shows where all the searches are coming from around the globe.
Not just that, I saw the one at the Google lobby recently, and its texture is so much better than this one. To think that it’s only a 20% project…
You do know this was made overnight, right?
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas!
TheGift Revolution.com
cool app
“Facebook says they are strongly considering productizing this”
They should focus on generating revenue first, I don’t see much of a commercial application in all that eye candy.
Especially when the eye candy includes viewing a wireframe of the 3d objects. I can’t believe that was mentioned. Tell us more about the data.
@Andy
Wow you have $hit load of time to waste on text reading (am jealous). It’s not about eye candy buddy, it’s about insight. Ever heard about information overload? That’s where meaningful “eye candies” come into picture.
That’s a powerful way to visualize social media interaction; thanks for your post!
Looks pretty nice, but I don’t see a use though. And without a usp I wouldn’t start thinking about creating revenue.
Google has had the some thing (for search requests) showing on a big flat screen tv at the entrance of one of their Mountain View buildings for years now. Not sure if it’s still there…
Yea, but its a 20% time proj.
Pretty sweet.
http://www.yout...h?v=extie0wO898
They are considering “productizing” but what about “monetizing” this ?
The vid of project palantír on youtube
http://www.yout...h?v=extie0wO898
That is very cool. I’d love to be able to create a localised (area specific) version or one for a busy niche but even so… cool.
i am bored with friendster and move to facebook. Facebook is good for privacy.
Deden
http://www.sosu...v3.blogspot.com
If you think this is cool, your mind will melt when you see how this could be applied to a Star Cave super visualization 3D 4K space. See 2008 Future in Review video at Calit2’s super visualization, super computing lab.
http://www.yout...h?v=5JrEk8UldJg
The Starcave uses special 4K projector back projecting on an array of screen that surround you. You wear 3D glasses to get full stereo 3D. The end of the video features the other “CAVE” with footage from Mars. Enjoy the future. Best, Tim
Amazing
This link is working
http://www.yout...h?v=8V0smY4-m2U
That’s very nice, but it’s a very similar concept with Google’s globe display of live searches, that has been around for years: http://www.yout...h?v=2FSE3TNFkJQ
Ironically, it looks like Facebook is only a block or two away from a company called Palantir. (http://www.palantirtech.com/)
Would get a bit more excited if it was an original idea. A rip-off of a rip-off. And they couldn’t even come up with an original name. Ripped it from a building up the street.
Sigh….fbook continues to disappoint. Lots of people, not much brain power.
kinda cute, though the last part looks a bit like thermonuclear warfare to me.
very very cool man, enjoyed alot
Wow this is like a total rip off of what they have in the google lobby — i mean it looks *exactly the same*. Maybe the guys used to work at google and had the source code lying around — just changed the server that provided the data haha.
Also who the hell would ever buy this???
Umm, nobody!
Sounds like they used jME for the visualization framework http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
If this uses this java engine there is no way it can accept data in real-time.
The latency should be really high.
That’s not true at all. Just from logical perspective, download time is much slower than processing time, you just need a fast server-side connection. On the client side the bottleneck is the HTTP connection, not Java.
On the technical side, Java has gotten quite a bit faster today. The huge drawback with Java was the freeze that happens when garbage collection is happening. Sun has alleviated this a lot with the new server setting (at the same time the desktop setting has improved quite a bit too). The JVM itself is performing very, very well nowadays. Java is even able to allocate memory faster than C++ (it’s still overall slower though).
Oh yeah, and Java is faster than Javascript (at least until JS JIT improves and becomes more mainstream).
The beams of light rising from earth into space look and awful lot like the visualization on the Smule iphone apps.
This is a very cool visualization, but I think there’s other broad usage. Imagine the voice carriers providing this kind of traffic information in real-time to provide a view of phone calls. Mother’s Day has always been the busiest calling day of the year. I think it would be fascinating to watch a visual representation of calling patterns throughout the day in time lapse to see what the movement of the sun does to calling patterns on the PSTN myself.
New York Talk Exhange.
These people know that there’s a huge startup called “Palantir” right down the street from them, right?
Whatever it is…I don’t it would be a real time representation…but a cool concept as Google’s.
They are trying to be as cool as Digg Labs… but have a long way to go to show the activity going on as usefully as the ARC.
Inspirational and original as is Digg, boring is this nuclear warfare style FB visualisation. With a valuation at $15bn thanks to Microsoft, surely they could get help and create something more impressive?
Whether or not this helps with monetization, it is a little bit of harmless fun. I just taught my nephew to trace Batman for perspective, before he can then free hand it. In a similar way, it cannot hurt FB to start by learning from the best (Google, Akamai) etc.
Thanks for your post!
Jack
http://www.amazooz.com
Sorry I was just watching Yoda / Star Wars on ITV, funny how it slipped into my grammar.
To be honest with you, I’m not that impressed by what I saw with palantír because the activities aren’t in any context – like, if you could tell the the activities and locations connected with a specific event/campaign, etc, that would be more interesting.
But that’s just me.
try spiderfriend
http://www.buta...m/spiderfriend/
Theses visualisations by Chris Harrison are really better :
http://www.chri...tMap/index.html
hope you like it…
This is some cool ass shit right here!
Oh btw
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A couple years back the folks at Yahoo’s design lab (RIP) posted videos of search visualization just like this. They did it in Processing. Wonder if any of these are the same people or just saw similar things?
http://sandbox....urst/index.html
1. You can’t productise a piece of visualisation, no matter how good the implementation is.
2. The technique and visual quality of this rendering is poor. To astonish your eyes, check out PS3’s Earth rendering in the Gaia music visualiser. It’s free, which makes my point in #1.
yes that is indeed quite cool
This is the view from space as 120 million people throw supersonic flaming sheep at each other across the curve of the Earth.
Great App. Gives a clue how expensive serving of the data might be
l love the idea
l love the idea.
“Ironically, it looks like Facebook is only a block or two away from a company called Palantir. (http://www.palantirtech.com/)“.
Ironically, or not, Peter Thiel is on the board of both.
I dont think “ironic” means what you think it means.
gram, why do you think the “or not” is in there?
A fine facebook ad is all. (Facebook is not google. That bit was not the final word in visualization.)
cool stuff. Shows that facebook has relatively little traction in Asia, though.
The Palantir Technologies up-the-street actually just moved into FB’s old Palo Alto real estate… this is more than a coincidence, but pretty ballsy trademark-infringement (unless Palantir performed this work for FB and Techcrunch misattributed it).