Introducing Xtimeline: A New Way To Write Your History

Written by Luyi Chen on July 6, 2007
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xtimelineXtimeline is new product being cooked in Shanghai for the last several months, now available to the global market. Lauren Kwan, co-founder of Famento, parent company of Xtimeline, told us they believe they’ve created a useful tool for displaying information in an engaging way which appeals to a global audience.

Xtimeline is a service where you can explore, create and share timeline, which is a widget for visualizing time-based events. Like Slideshare and Swivel, Xtimeline basically follows appearance of Youtube, but concentrates on another data format.

There’re lots of prototypes of timeline application available, especially those open source project. The most significant of them is from MIT SIMILE project. I used to see the geekest VC in Shanghai using it as his life log. But this is still such a geek’s toy. Never believe that it requires zero software installation.

Xtimeline makes this data visualization tool available to the mass. To start with your first timeline, simply click the create button and input basic information like title and description. Then you can add time-based events into the timeline. You timeline is available for preview now. You can switchback for further edit at anytime.

Notice the bottom sliding bar. In its background, there’s a diagram showing density of events, which gives you a big picture of the whole data. And there’s details landing page for every event. So you won’t lose any details as well as get great data visualization solution.

I also some ideas to make this product even better.

1) Chronological view of the data. Although timeline is a great visualization tool, but it’s not the best way to go through a long list of events. It’s good for locating a particular event on a long list or a birds eye view of the orders.

2) Full screen view. This is true for any visualization tools. Some timeline really looks tiring in small resolution.

3) RSS for timeline. Timeline is dynamic data type, isn’t it? If you are maintaining The Life of Britney Spears, the timeline will grow as time going forward. Without RSS, it’s hard to follow.

4) Export and Import. Timeline is more of a rendering engine. So let users move the data in XML or JSON format will make it more flexible.

The product doesn’t support Chinese yet. But Lauren said there’s a Chinese version coming. We are looking forward to it.

History of China timeline

2 Responses to “Introducing Xtimeline: A New Way To Write Your History”

  1. The Editors’ Journal » Blog Archive » Ferrari drag-racing, China water pollution map, new China-made webware on July 10th, 2007 3:45 pm

    [...] China Web2.0 Review: Introducing Xtimeline: A New Way To Write Your History – Developed in Shanghai for export [...]

  2. Timeku: Yet Another Timeline Hosting Based On SIMILE : China Web2.0 Review on September 15th, 2007 9:50 am

    [...] Back in July, we introduced Xtimeline, an ajax widget for time based event. It’s a product for global market. Not much Chinese content has been created yet, although the company has rolled out a Chinese version after we profiled it. [...]

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