I’ve been wondering how the Flickr era was going to close for a while, but the resignation letter couldn’t have been a more fitting ending to the story. Looking back, I think there were a lot of smart things that Yahoo! did during that time which are easy to overlook. The end result of the action muted the intent, in many cases, but the desire to do the right thing was and is still very prevalent.
I’ve been playing around with Swivel, Dipity, Timeline and Google Docs a bit recently to try different ways to use data for storytelling. So, the flickr departure news seemed like a great time to give these things a shot.
Below is the “flickr era timeline”, the smart things that Yahoo! did from early 2005 to the middle of 2008:
I’ve also opened sharing on the spreadsheet. Feel free to add to it.
Here’s the embed code for the timeline:
Matt, interesting experiment. From the outside, I’m not sure why RightMedia is included in this list of smart things.
Did you try and map (ahem) Yahoo’s stock price to these different events, perhaps using Swivel?
Rightmedia is great technology and clueful people. Definitely a smart move, in my opinion.
I’ll have to try the stock parallel idea. I suspect that the market failed to reward the company for any of these things
I tried to use Swivel to compare the stock changes against the events, but it didn’t quite work out. The data input and rendering are still a bit immature. That work is here:
http://www.swivel.com/data_columns/show/8688529
I also tried Dipity, but it’s a bit annoying having to enter each event manually. I could be bothered to do that work again.
Are there other tools that make it easy to plot data on a chart and then to share it?