It seems that the timeline is the new map. The famous Google/Yahoo!/… maps that enable so many so-called mash-ups (we all put something on a map and said: “wow, that is cool”). The timelines are hype these days apparently, with Wikiwix, Plurk, Dipity or the swiss one: Mixin.
I recently bumped on some prototypes for Firefox history browsing on Planet Mozilla, made by Wei Zhou: very impressing and interesting. It makes me realizing that the common single issue for all the calendar or timeline I saw aren’t going with the internet way. If you recall “Dao of web design” back in 2000, the internet is a new media with new rules. We have books with pages, agenda with grids but it doesn’t make any sense — most of the time — to strictly reuse those paradigms onto the web. Anyone tried flickriver (or twitterriver) sees directly how enjoyable this is to only scroll down and not having to deal with pages.
From my point of view, timeline for the web have to be flexible. More data: can I have a bigger space then? It’s empty: so collapse it to the minimum. A timeline is after all, the vertical scrolling made horizontal. Plurk even catches the scroll event, which makes me crazy. A timeline, have to use the maximum space it can, because you’re putting the visitor into something new, or different at least. A user, I, will continue to take advantages of what he knows. Dipity does the work pretty well because it puts all the content inside it, everything that is external belongs to meta data or actions you can trigger. Proof is you can browse it fullscreen.
A timeline is a browsing facet you can offer, but don’t rely on it too much as you cannot rely on a map to create an application. It cannot define it. On the other hand it is a great help. A timeline is more visual than a list, more direct. You can remember it from time to time and figure out what changed since last time I saw it. You also should be able to see where are the hot spots, like you do with a graph.
“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” — Jeffrey Zeldman
Timelines or graphs aren’t data, are nothing without them. All visualization metaphors have to serve the content, to make it more understandable, actionable or relevant. If it’s not the case, maybe remove them (and read “Administrative debris”) It’s almost certain that I can be amused to discover a new way to browse data, to engage with a web application. Everyone wants to get things done, in a pleasant and simple way and it’s not a map, a timeline or anything else that you may imagine that will solve your problems. It’s like regular expressions, now you have two problems, don’t you?
Timeline for Bikini Test agenda.
Anyway, I made a little timeline experiment. It’s for the well-known Bikini Test and in French... have fun. It’s quite interesting to see how Firefox, Opera and Webkit (via Epiphany) behave with it. Webkit wins.
