Pete Abilia produced a timeline of Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft acquisitions. I found the data about those companies less interesting that how he did it. Turns out he used a timeline tool from the Simile project at MIT. Here's a timeline for dinosaurs. (You can draw your own conclusions about the juxtaposition of the three companies in Pete's timeline and the dinosaur timeline.)
I think these timelines are a great way to present event data on the Web. Just one complaint to far: these don't have a scroll bar at the bottom, so there's not much by way of visual cues about the fact that there is timeline off the screen that you have to drag over to see. The little hand is cute, but people are used to scroll bars.
The event data is stored in an XML file that could easily be produced from a calendar program or what have you. Just like Google Maps, there's no need to install an software--client or server side.
Join Discussion