January 15th, 2009
Treemap History
Ben Shneiderman’s Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies is probably the most comprehensive catalog of treemap usage in desktop applications and on the web, with some historical notes how the notion of treemap came about and evolved over the years.
Circular treemaps are my favorite. I think they are perfect for visualizing people from your social web circle.
Would not it be much easier to explore your LinkedIn connections and their connections with this treemap, rather than sift through paginated lists?
I expect an increased usage of treemap visualizations in the coming years as we pile up more data, form connections, use online services for sharing, and service providers open up their apis for developers to foster social web innovation beyond the basic tagging features, paginated lists, image galleries and strips.