I can’t disagree with most of what you said and in fact I feel you’ve drafted a really impressive set of requirements which I would also love to see in future releases of senti-meter. However, I did want to share my reasons for recently tweeting you that senti-meter was the “sexiest sentiment visualization ever”.

These days you can’t throw a stone but you hit a sentiment app. They are everywhere, and for the most part they are utterly dull and unengaging. If I have to look at another pie chart I am going to be ill What struck me novel about this approach was exactly their emphasis on creating an interaction experience. Combining dragging, clicking, and hovering, across every inch of available real-estate, to squeeze as much as possible into one visualization without making it over-complicated. I believe slick navigation is more important than us analytics folks often appreciate.

Does senti-meter ultimately need to expose more of the underlying analytics? For sure! Does it need to extend with more advanced analytics and provide new visualizations to facilitate those navigation experiences? Absolutely! But I really hope that the next release doesn’t loose sight of the aesthetics and the navigation experience, because that’s what truly differentiates it.

Even us analysts need a bit of bling

Your title makes me think about the present day, and how we who are deeply interested in analytics should recall that we’re a minority. Walk down the street, pick out any person from the crowd, even any business person from the crowd, and ask yourself, “Does this person give a rat’s ass about business analytics?” The answer is sure to be no!

thanks,
celso