Visualize History

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a new site called World History.  They make a pretty bold claim: “we connect the dots of history, connect you to history. We want to compile the entire history of the world on one fun and interactive website.”

Uh oh.  That should sound pretty familiar to you regular readers, and it certainly sounded familiar to me.  I had to check it out.

The site is in private beta so I added my email to their list, and, soon enough, was invited to give it a go.  Right off the bat I could see some glaring similarities between the interface I dreamt of 18 months ago and the one they had implemented.  Their demos are pretty thorough so I won’t go into functionality too much.  If you do watch the videos, you’ll notice they have a simpler version of the slider that I’ve written extensively about, and that you can navigate their map of historical events in the same ways that I envisioned (and implemented) for Visualize History.  I really like their site.  It’s snappy and from the looks of things, the data and the map are well connected. 

But that’s sort of the problem.  Here is a real company, presumably with funding and time, or at least more than I have (0 and 0, respectively).  They have actual code that actual people are using.  And talking about, too.  Tech Crunch wrote them up, which led to some teachers, authors, historians, and consultants to do the same.  It has also attracted a few people interested in genealogy, which, if you recall, I predicted would happen. 

So they got the interface, the press, the data.  What could they do better?  Glad you asked.  I have a few issues with their site, some subtle and some less subtle.  I’d be interested to know why thy chose to put ads where they did.  I think they are distracting and make the site look ugly (like all ads), but to the point where I would be less inclined to use the site or share it.  I’m not sure why, but it reminds me of sites whose sole purpose is to attract traffic and turn it into clicks on ads, in a sleazy way.  I don’t mean to say that it’s a sleazy site.  Rather, it feels like it was designed by programmers.  The ads make it look like experts-exchange, and the options on the left make me feel like I’m using Microsoft Access, not some snappy Web 2.0 AJAXy site. 

As long as we’re on the subject of layout, I feel that the map got the short end of the stick, so to speak.  For me, the map always deserved the most prominent role, since that was the main point of interaction for the user.  Worldhistory.com seems to want to emphasize the content more, by giving it as much space as they gave the map.  As a result, the map is cramped and too narrow in its focus.  Perhaps the relative size of the map shows that we differ more fundamentally.

I would have never thought a person would want to pick a point on a map and then scroll through that point’s history.  That’s rarely how we learn history, and the great advantage gained by displaying history visually starts with the graphical relations that can be displayed.  Although they do have tagging functionality, it seems that the ability to link historical events together is still very limited on the site.  It’s not an easy problem, and I hope that’s in their presumably long list of features to implement.  I will be interested to see how many people like to interact with the map this way.

All that being said, I clearly love this idea.  I’ve worked on something sort of similar for a long time, and completely believe that demand for an app like this will rapidly grow.  I wish the best of luck to those guys, and hope the features keep on coming.