Mashups for Mom

I just read an excellent article “Visualizing the Future of Information Visualization” in (only available online if you have a way to access ACM.org content, I think). In it Aaron Marcus asks “What [information visualization] tool will almost every person have on her/his computing/communication device in ten years, one that is taken for granted and comes with almost every device?” That is, will an info visualization tool ever achieve the ubiquity of tools that function as spreadsheets or word-processors? Can info visualization or sonification be a “killer app”?

This brought my thinking up to a higher level on this subject. After all, hypertext was only a theory or highly specialized application when I was born and it has make a profound impact on the world today. There will certainly be more killer apps to come. In fact, I think I’ve seen a glimmer of it already.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been around for decades. I know some people who work in that field, generally, trained geographers who use specialized tools. One small advance toward meaningful GIS usage is Zillow.com. Their slogan is “your edge in real estate” and they really deliver with (at least in my area) extremely detailed house value information. It’s not every day that a “web 2.0″ type application comes along that not only will my mom find interesting, but extremely useful. I think that’s a very important test. A lot of ideas are not ready for prime-time and that’s fine, but it’s interesting to find one that is.