Facebook Ownership

Another interesting piece of data that I stumbled upon is on the ownership on Facebook on http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-ownership-2011-12 .

I find that not only that there is a small error in the data, but the use of pie chart spoils its purpose.

Here is the image.

Now here are the confusions in this Viz.,

• Use of colors are inappropriate. The smaller sectors are hard to differentiate leading to loss of understanding of data.
• Hard to compare between who is larger owner just by seeing the pie chart.
• Colors in the legend is hard to see and correlate with the chart.
• The sectors also do not provide enough data via proportion for analysis.

Now apart from all this, there is a small error in the data. We see that both Goldman Sachs' Clients and Perter Thiel/Clarium Capital are accounted for $3 billion , but the quantifiable percentages being 3% and 4% respectively. This might have arose because of approximating to the nearest number, but should have done appropriately.

What I would have done differently is plot this on a simple bar chart, like I tried here. [Click on it for a larger view]

You can see that the data appears in a more clear format now. There error in data still persists though, since my whole intention was to provide a better visualization. 

Here in this chart we can clearly see who owns what percentage of the company and how much amount is involved. We can also correspond the details along with the owners name, unlike in a pie chart where we have to map each sector and color to the name.

For the accurate data on the ownership of Facebook, please visit http://whoownsfacebook.com/

I have used Tableau software to create this visualization, it can be downloaded from http://www.tableausoftware.com/ .

A change in perspective

I came across this post on http://visual.ly/areas-europe , which actually communicates a rather simple piece of information - Areas of all the European Countries. It got me thinking as to how far could someone go to complicate anything.

The Viz., which was posted on the website is

Source : http://visual.ly/areas-europe

Phew!! that's tough to decipher. What this visualizes and is trying to communicate is basic information as I mentioned above - Areas of all the countries in Europe. Though we see that it has some artistic effect to it, it becomes tough trying to understand what it is trying to tell us. This is a basic bubble chart, where the size of the bubble corresponds to the area, positioned alphabetically. However we see that Europe is positioned last which can be ambiguous to a few.

The ambiguities that we can see here are:

• Which bubble corresponds to which country - Due to fair amount of overlaps
• Europe placed at the last - Is this considered a country too, if so where is its bubble, if not why is it there?

I gave a shot on trying to make it simpler. You can click on them to make them larger and have a clearer look.

This is a very fair simple example (less artistic though) which clearly depicts the areas of each country belonging to Europe. This is a simple bar chart where the length of the bars shows the areas, lined in a descending order of their respective areas.

What is clear in this viz.,

• Country names
• Areas of each country
• Comparison

Another try at making this better is.,

Here I have ranked each country based on their areas largest being ranked 1 lowest being 49. The shade in the color shows the difference in ranks.

I wish I could embed the Viz., here so that the area details could also be shown, if I had done that here, it would be cluttered.

The tool I used to make these visualizations is Tableau, which is available for download at http://www.tableausoftware.com/