I was having lunch with the two great developers behind Crunchbase, Mark and Henry, and we got to talking about the future of the site. We got to talking about the site’s pretty amazing charts and graphs and I found out that they were not from some GNU licensed php library, but rather Google’s own charting API.
Google’s charting API works through a REST API where you place the parameters of your chart or graph into a URL string for Google to process into a pretty image like the one below.
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=400×225&chd=s:helloWorld&cht=lc&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Mar|Apr|May|June|July|1:||50+Kb
equals
This was interesting to me not just because Google’s able to generate these nice looking charts fast and easily, but because anyone using the API is sending their data right to Google in a highly descriptive format. Lets say the Bureau of Labor statistics decides to use the API for their upcoming web report. Now every time they publish a graph not only their readers know about the latest data, but so does Google. All the data can also be easily sourced by the referring URL of the request.
I don’t know if Google is planning on doing something like this, but it certainly seems possible for them to build a search engine around the data being pushed to their servers similar to the destination site Swivel built around graphing. Only Google’s data will be dynamic, whereas Swivel’s data depends on uploaded datasets from users.
Think of this as a distributed to destination model as opposed to destination to distribution model that many content sites like YouTube have (you make content, then distribute it). Google has provided tools users can use to generate charts across the web (distributed), which could be coalesced into a destination site for all sorts of datasets.
