Visualize Your Cloud Presence Using Mohiomap

There are lots of good visualization stories recently, or maybe I’m more focused on API driven visualizations. Who knows? This particular post is an API story because Mohiomap, the company at the center is using APIs to accomplish their “vision”, not because they have an API—which actually would be a nice way to pay it forward, but that is another story. Regardless, I think what Mohiomap is up to, is interesting on a lot of levels, bur primarily because in coming years we need to be able to better understand this new, cloud-based world we are creating for ourselves.

Why am I blogging about this? Because Mohiomap is driven with APIs, and if done right, it can make a big difference in how we see our virtual selves, whether the business or brand personas we are crafting online, or our personal self that is spread across Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, and other API driven platforms. We currently can easily see our personas within each silo, like Facebook profile, Twitter profile, or Github profile, but understanding ourselves across the places we frequent online is much more difficult—something only possible when you begin using APIs.

I’ve had a visualization research project on my radar for some time now, but I think its time that I start publishing it for everyone to enjoy. API driven visualization is an important layer to my overall API economy research, and whether its for the meta layer of APIs, or for the valuable resources they are serving up, like wall posts, messages, photos, videos, or business documents--visualizations will continue to drive how we evolve our understanding of the digital world that is unfolding at a breakneck speed.

With the addition of Mohiomap, I’m starting to develop quite a list of API driven visualization services and tooling. Enough to warrant its own research area, and be given a certain amount of attention each week. Ultimately it will depend on what the community delivers, but I’m pretty sure that visualizations will dominate the stories here on API Evangelist for the foreseeable future.