Pet peeve on sparklines: they're clean because they get rid of chartjunk, but they're also pretty uninformative without context. Right now, they add almost nothing to the presentation ("@dropbox hasn't changed <much> since <some time ago>, but this other guy's popularity is <swinging wildly/pretty small and noisy>").
Tufte originally intended them to be inserted into text and contextualized by it. As an extension, he suggested adding small indicators of scale and position as colored dots for example.
Either that or just lose them and graph the relative results of each of the contenders. It all depends on what kind of story you want to tell.
Edit: just noticed that you mention that this information is tracked over the last 30 days, but since that's not localized to the graphs, it's pretty easy to not notice it.
Fair point. I couldn't come up with a better way to display 57 charts on one page which give some kind of interesting information without it being a total mess.
The information is actually tracked indefinitely from when I started monitoring it, and I have daily changes for more than 30 days for each of these accounts at this point. I also have an interface for browsing each one of them in a more granular fashion so that the chartjunk is visible (I can give you access to this if you're interested). Here's Posterous for example: http://goo.gl/QSGp4
Do you have any ideas for how to better present such a comparison between so many data sources? Keeping in mind that scale varies hugely between the smallest and largest.
Edit: To me, the most interesting thing to look at in this showcase is the "shape" of the sparkline (which indicates stability) combined with the percent delta change next to it (click on it to get absolute numbers).
I'd merge the chart and the current followers count. Even after you click the delta to find its absolute count, it's difficult to interpret it (to me). Place a green dot at the end of the chart and a red at the start and then color code two numbers to correspond. It'll give a sense of scale and variation that's currently missing. It'll also immediately suggest a linear model for followers over the last X days which might be a good summary for some names.
I'm not sure what to draw from the scale-independent representation you've got right now since I can't tell if wide swings in the sparkline indicate something really changed in way people follow that name or if it's just noise. This is a perfect opportunity for some sort of random process model which could be used to suggest that certain spikes (such as the recent one for @reddit) are maybe more interesting that real random variation.
I'd also look for ways to investigate and highlight weird behaviors like @greplin's bimodalism. That a pretty huge.
I'm not sure I understand how the expanded interface matches to the sparklines, actually. Posterous' doesn't match up with the sparkline much at all that I can see. Are you doing linear detrending?
I suppose as always there's no magic bullet for information presentation. There are any number of questions I think you could ask of a data set like this (stability, relative growth, comparison with other metrics like investment or publicity, looking for spikes).
I imagine that comparing each different company against the others would probably be not terribly useful since they're all at different scales, but I'd be very interested in things like how well data from one source could be predicted from all the others (which just starts out as computing correlation between them all) which might help you to separate out whole market trends from successes from each particular company.
The Tuftean method, which I support, still desires a complete, untransformed view of the raw data. So don't remove the sparklines. Just make them more interpretable by giving scale to the shape using further real data. Any of these cross-company models can potentially be added as additional information to the sparklines. Charts remain interesting and interpretable so long as they're drawn mostly in data-ink and are hierarchically readable.
You should check out Tufte's personally-curated forum (he and his staff carefully filter out only the best posts to be made visible) topic on Sparklines: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... There is some good discussion there.
we were able to get ours after registering the trademark and then waiting for the twitter account to be dormant for 1 year. Luckily, no one was really using it. If it was not dormant, I suspect it would have been much harder if not impossible to get.
