Timelinks will blow your mind in 2012
December 21st, 2011Justin Manor
Timelinks is a slick new visualization startup based in Brooklyn, New York, helmed by our good friend and serial entrepreneur Jeff Beil. If Facebook’s Timeline is trying to take your one-dimensional blipvert social experience and add the axis of time (resulting in a 2D scrolling HTML page), Jeff is attempting something a bit more… ambitious. (Chrome Required)
The central idea of Timelinks is you can see not only one person’s events laid out chronologically on a timeline, but that you can visually see how everyone’s timelines intersect. Events or photos shared by people show up as physical links between the timelines. But that’s not even the real story here. The amazing thing is that this isn’t just some social media website. All of this data is presented to the viewer in a 3D navigable world of people, connections, and media in your browser. You get to pan, zoom, and fly your way through an infinitely regenerating galaxy of information without any scrollbars or page refreshes.
Before it’s public launch, Timelinks is letting visitors play around with Hollywood actors’ timelines to see how their careers have intersected. The data is all pulled from the Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) and users are allowed to visually zoom around the collected data of actors and movies in a visually engaging format. Starting with Kevin Bacon’s entire filmography laid out chronologically, you can see all the actors he has starred alongside, who they have worked with, ad infinitum. Check out the demo here. You’ll need Chrome.
Our timeline first cred with Mr. Beil’s about 3 years ago, through a mutual friend. Jeff was looking for a design team to sketch out this grand idea he had of a graphically interconnected social world that went beyond a scrolling list of the last 10 minutes of wall posts and twitter update micro-burps. We fell in love with the idea and helped Jeff with creative direction, graphic design, and user interface studies. Timelinks.me is accepting Beta users and is hair’s breadth away from launching. Keep your eyes peeled here for more news, and go check out that demo!
