Many Eyes is a web site that provides collaborative visualization services, allowing users to upload data sets, visualize them, and comment on each other's visualizations. This paper describes a first interview-based study of Many Eyes users, which sheds light on user motivation for creating public visualizations. Users talked about data for many reasons, from scientific research to political advocacy to hobbies. One consistent theme across these different scenarios is the use of visualizations in communication and collaborative practices. Collaboration and conversation, however, often took place outside the site, leaving no traces on Many Eyes itself. In other words, despite spurring significant social activity, Many Eyes is not so much an online community as a "community component" which users insert into pre-existing online social systems.

We describe the design and deployment of Many Eyes, a public web site where users may upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on discussions. The goal of the site is to support collaboration around visualizations at a large scale by fostering a social style of data analysis in which visualizations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a medium to spur discussion among users. To support this goal, the site includes novel mechanisms for end-user creation of visualizations and asynchronous collaboration around those visualizations. In addition to describing these technologies, we provide a preliminary report on the activity of our users.

The NameVoyager, a Web-based visualization of historical trends in baby naming, has proven remarkably popular. We describe design decisions behind the application and lessons learned in creating an application that makes do-it-yourself data mining popular. The prime lesson, it is hypothesized, is that an information visualization tool may be fruitfully viewed not as a tool but as part of an online social environment. In other words, to design a successful exploratory data analysis tool, one good strategy is to create a system that enables "social" data analysis. We end by discussing the design of an extension of the NameVoyager to a more complex data set, in which the principles of social data analysis played a guiding role.