SparkTweets!
I just discovered SparkTweets!
Now there's a way to visually show a small bit of data in a Tweet, Facebook post, text message or other similar format.
I believe the credit for SparkTweets goes to Alex Kern and his post from nearly a year ago, but they've been getting more and more attention the past week: Jason Kottke wrote about them a few days ago and the Wall Street Journal has just started experimented. Zach Seward of the WSJ discusses them here, with a lot of examples.
And here are two SparkTweet generators for creating the unicode text blocks:
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SparkTweets are a variation of Sparklines which were created by Edward Tufte as a way of displaying a great amount of information in a small space. They're especially good for showing many data points over an extended period of time—things like stock prices or win/loss rates for sports teams. Here are a few examples.
The newest version of Excel has a sparkline tool. It's not hard to use, but here's more on it. I've played around it with a bit when tracking my investment portfolio.
