That is a very clever visualization of a 4D data set. I really liked the concept of Swivel.com when it released, but gapminder + google seems like tough competition.

The implementation here is really the amazing part; the basic data-vis tool is pretty simple (I wrote a much uglier variant in Mathematica, inspired by a proprietary stats app), but if they can/will expose this via a clean, open API, then this sort of visualization can become much more widespread. I don't know if/how google intends to make money from this, but if it's available as essentially a commodity visualization component for the web, then everyone benefits.

very interesting. This might be the first time Google ended up acquiring someone based on their Google TechTalk.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=engEDU+gapminder

during gapminder presentation during leweb3. playback at minute 7:09: http://portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/70070

I've just spent an hour on gapminder. So cool. Much better than Swivel, in my opinion, though clearly more limited.