10’000’000 Foursquare Users

Somebody brought to my attention again the Foursquare user adoption animation they created in honour of their 10 millionth member. A great achievement for Foursquare and just the beginning of many more awesome things I am sure.

In the animation, if you look at the still at August of 2009, you see the US gaining some traction and this flare across the pond. That is Amsterdam where at the time Foursquare was being adopted hand over fist.

The story behind that is somewhat interesting and has been told, but this graphic does make it poignant again. Having visited SxSWi that last March, Robert Gaal and myself saw the launch of Foursquare and quickly got hooked. That was the year that location had not been played out yet at all, Latitude was fresh, Fire Eagle was still relevant and Brightkite was being used. Location was on the cusp.

Back in the Netherlands we quickly got in touch with the guys to get the service launched here. We thought waiting would probably result in the Netherlands being served last (as usual). After some back and forth we got everything up and running and Amsterdam was the first international city on Foursquare. The rest is history as can be seen in the graph.

The Alchemists of Wall Street

Not a dataviz at all, but an abstract evocative animation by Onesize for VPRO’s Quants: “the alchemists of Wall Street”.

The abstractness of the direction was deliberatly kept abstract and not explanatory, because only few people really understand the way Quants work and think.

So purely for visual effect (I would argue wholly against the quote above), but still nice at that.

Curious about the stuff catalogtree have been working on for what I believe is the same series but I haven’t kept track of television for ages now. (via @gertjan)