StatPlot is the newest project of sports statistic aggregator StatSheet and you’re likely to enjoy it whether you’re a sports fan or not. The site makes it easy to assemble attractive, dynamic charts for sports statistics in minutes. Navigate through the long list of options by point and click, autocomplete, cut and paste and you’re done. Loads of data is already there and available for your use at no charge.
It’s a fun site to use. Basketball, football and NASCAR are supported initially – hopefully baseball and hockey will be next. There’s OpenID integration, the image selection is really nice and it’s just great. It’s still a little rough around the edges but given that the service just launched today – we’re impressed. This is the kind of democratized data visualization that any field could benefit from with enough open data and a good user interface.
??Check out this chart of points made by Lebron James throughout the basketball season. I made it in 2 minutes and I hardly know who Lebron James is! (I saw him on TV at a bar during a playoff game and it was pretty clear he’s incredible.)
The Adobe Flash charts that StatPlot produces are even nicer, but they aren’t easy to scale down to the size I needed.
The whole StatSheet franchise is an interesting one to watch. See TechCrunch’s recent coverage of the company’s tussle with Twitter over innovation on that platform.
Bring on the huge data sets and easy charting interfaces! We’d love to see a little of that action over at Data.gov, for example. Heck, let’s see these kinds of options put on top of the forthcoming ClearSpring API tracking hundreds of millions of peoples’ sharing activities online.
As StatSheet said on its blog today: “There are other services (Swivel, iCharts.net, Many-Eyes) that allow you to upload data and create a variety of visualizations, but these all suffer from the same issue. The average sports fan does not have access to quality sports stats to upload. With StatPlot, you don’t need to bring your own data because you can use the expansive StatSheet database!”
It’s not just sports fans that could use a hand with data sets. We all could. Thanks for leading the way in truly democratizing data visualization, StatSheet.
