Trendalyzer

» see google.com/publicdata as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

almost nobody used trendalyzer. what people did was watch a swedish professor use it, which is a strange relationship to have with a piece of software and probably the only one it ever really had. hans rosling's ted talk went online in 2006 and got forwarded by everybody who had ever tried to explain a table of numbers to a room and failed. i watched the video a long time before i knew the tool underneath it had a name.

the name was trendalyzer and it came out of the gapminder foundation, set up in stockholm in 2005 by ola rosling and anna rosling rönnlund with hans rosling, who was ola's father. the son and daughter-in-law wrote the software. the father stood in front of it at conferences and shouted at bubbles. it went public as a web service called gapminder world in march 2006, built in flash, loaded with un and world bank development data going back two centuries.

the chart itself is the whole invention. a bubble per country, income on one axis and life expectancy on the other, population as the size of the bubble and continent as its color. then a slider for the year. five variables at once, which is one more than a printed page can carry, and the fifth one is time. you press play and two hundred years of history crawls across the screen, with the countries that industrialized early pulling away from the pack and the rest catching up faster than anybody in the room expects.

google acquired trendalyzer in march 2007 and the gapminder development team relocated to california that april. the terms were never published. the reasoning google gave at the time was that it could put the tool in front of more people than a swedish foundation could, which was true, and which turned out to be the smaller half of what happened next.

~ the record ~

~ what google did with it ~

first it became a gadget. the motion chart turned up inside the google visualization api and google spreadsheets, so anybody with a table of numbers could get the rosling bubbles out of their own data. it was still flash, which nobody thought about in 2008 and which decided its fate later.

then it became a website. google public data explorer launched on 8 march 2010 out of google labs, with world bank and eurostat data loaded in, and in 2011 google opened it up so anybody could upload a dataset in a format called dspl. for a few years it was the best free tool in existence for looking at national statistics, and it was sitting on a google url where nobody found it unless somebody sent them a link.

~ the slow part ~

nothing was announced. the motion chart gadget stopped being something you could create around 2017, killed by the same flash problem that killed everything flash, and google never shipped the html5 replacement its own engineers kept saying was coming. hans rosling died on 7 february 2017, which is the year the google side of this stopped moving in any direction at all.

public data explorer sat there for another seven years without a feature. the announcement came on 19 december 2024, in a mailing list for the dataset format, and said the service would be discontinued on 10 january 2025 with users redirected to datacommons.org. the stated reason was that the underlying technology had become outdated. that is accurate and it is also a description of what happens when nobody is assigned to a product for a decade.

~ what survived ~

gapminder never stopped. after the sale it built the thing again from scratch in javascript, and gapminder tools runs today at the same address doing the same job the flash version did, without a corporate owner. the software google bought is dead and the software it was a copy of is fine, which is not the usual direction for this kind of story.

the other survival is harder to point at. every animated scatter plot in a news article, every explainer where a dot moves across a decade, comes from a lecture hall in monterey in 2006 where somebody proved that a chart could hold an audience. rosling used to say the data was already public and nobody was looking at it. he was right, and the fix he built for that got bought by a search company and left in a drawer.

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