I was at the Personal Democracy Forum this week and had a nice chat with an engineer from the Google Maps team. He told me about Google Fusion Tables.
Welcome to the future, everyone. Just let it sink in a little…
United States – Percentage of Population on Facebook in 2009
Tables are essentially just spreadsheets in their presentation. But in function they are actually more like SQL tables that you interact with via an API. You can store your own data on here and interact with it–read: you really don’t need a local SQL installation on your web server to create powerful web apps. Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that there are also public tables, many of which include valuable socially and politically relevant data.
From within the Google Fusion tables account, you can also generate on-the-fly interactive charts, graphs and maps.
