“Maps are like campfires — everyone gathers around them, because they allow people to understand complex issues at a glance” ~ Sonoma Ecology Center

I count myself in the subculture of people who love maps. I enjoy Subreddits like Map Porn and Imaginary Maps, follow Terrible Maps, and swoon over these amateur cartographers and designers who critique, discuss, and redesign existing transit maps.

Timelines are just interesting and similar to maps. Timelines are to historical time what maps are to physical space. Both zoom us out and show us a different perspective. A timeline can help us see patterns, find cause/effect, and remind us about time scale and how long or quick things actually take. This is some of the motivation behind this pet project I’m starting: to create a visual timeline of the tech industry. As far as I can tell, nothing like this exists.

I’m not sure exactly what this timeline will be useful for but I know there will be something — you always see something new when looking at a map.

My plan is to read through tech company origin stories like In the Plex and Like, Comment, Subscribe and record the key dates and events into a spreadsheet via an Airtable form. That will create the structured data to display a timeline on a website somehow (this part is still TBD).

Each company’s timeline will be a layer in the larger timeline, and like a traffic layers on a map you’ll be able to show/hide them and search for patterns. In the future, other data like user #s, stock price, or GDP could surface more insights.

Today I’m starting this project in earnest by hiring someone to read and record the dates from Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter. These will be added to the few hundred key events I’ve already gathered myself from books like How the Internet Happened, reading news, and listening to podcasts. I’ll keep you posted.