Regarding Those Sparktweets
Sparktweets have become popular on Twitter recently, enough to warrant a mention on kottke.org, the internet’s blog of record.
They’re junk.
These Twitter sparklines do a poor job of conveying statistical information, even setting aside the occasional display issues on your platform of choice. Take the this tweet, by Scott Klein of the Wall Street Journal.
Delete the blocks and the explanatory “A sparktweet” and you can add more information, such as the year’s those acquisitions occurred. (For those keeping score: 2005 by eBay, 2009 by private investors and now 2011 by Microsoft.)
Even worse is this tweet from the Wall Street Journal.
The data it purportedly represents is worthless, at best confusing. There’s no baseline, no scale, no way to tell the bounds of the upper or lower limits of the “chart.” The tallest block might as well be 873 percent.1
Since the current working set of Unicode characters gives you a range of six, as noted by WSJ’s Zach Seward, sparktweets fail Edward Tufte’s definition of a sparkline2 as “small, high-resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images.” (Emphasis mine.) Tufte designed them to work well in print applications due to the high pixel and information density of printed ink.
Sure, sparktweets are an interesting visual hack that will draw eyeballs to your update, floating aimlessly in the stream of other tweets. But as a device to share information, they’re hardly worth the Unicode they’re printed on.
Epilogue:
Tufte himself follows up on the phenomenon:
Than Tibbets [sic] rightly criticizes the Wall Street Journal sparktweets, but perhaps some sparktweets can be rescued.
My view: if you’re doing Twitter, then sparktweets is about all you can do in regard to data graphics. So now and then a sparktweet will be better than nothing, but that’s all it’s better than (which is a short summary of Twitter in general, although is it amazing what now and then can be done in one 140-character sentence). Sparktweets are awfully low resolution and easily prone to data distortion. The solution: every sparktweet should be accompanied by the beginning and the ending number in the time sequence (which burns up 6 to 8 characters toward the 140 maximum, but with a great increase in data-presentation integrity).
