“Sparklines,” defined by the inimitable Edward Tufte as word-sized graphics easily embedded into text with no needs for captions or boxes. This has now been extended to the visualisation of data within a tweet, I give you – “sparktweets”.

With the expansion of Twitter as an information hub, and the growing use of data visualisations within the digital world, the innovation of sparktweets should prove useful as another data visualisation outlet to convey information within 140 characters. Sparktweets gives the ability to present facts and data quickly and directly into people daily media stream without having the commitment of a click or tap, providing fun and informative data in consumption bites.

Launched about a month ago by journalist Zach Sweard, after him and Brian Aguilar came up with the idea (you can read about it here).  It has stated to take hold on Twitter.  I quick Twitter search using hashtag #sparktweet reveals the following results.

At present there is a real mixture of data being visualised, with some choosing the more serious subject manner (ie like the first Sparktweet for the @WSJ), other presenting chart junk, my favour being the sports info – plays naturally into my interests of sports and data.  Also can see the potential of visualising through tweets your personal info, playing of the idea of services like Nike+ and Daytum which collect the data, it could be feed directly into your stream to share.

Some best practices guides listed below are provided by Zach Seward:

• Place the chart at the beginning of a sparktweet to minimize how often it breaks over two lines. You might even try a line break after the chart, which will render in some Twitter clients.
• Six unique values can be visualized in a sparktweet. because the current iteration makes use of these characters: ▁▂▃▅▆▇ Any more than six and the differences begin to blur.
• It’s possible to view Unicode in TweetDeck: Go to Settings > Colors/Font and choose International Font / Twitter Key. Almost no TweetDeck users enable this option, however, so it’s worth writing sparktweets to be legible without the visual.
• People really seem to like sparktweets, but it’s unclear how much of the reaction is due to novelty. Like Facebook profile hacks,Twitter art succeeds by expanding the creative boundaries of a medium while adhering to its strict rules.

If you can would like to a create a Sparktweet, a webpage is already up and running from The Data Collective providing a handy little tool for you create  it yourself.

Also don’t forget to check out hashtag #sparktweet for yourself to see how others are creating.

Tags: buzz, graphic, socialmedia