Verticle search and map mashups are a big part of Web 2.0, and we generally expect maps to be useful. the obvious monetization is real estate, and sites like Zillow have been focusing in on that industry assiduously, providing users with lucrative data about price and valuation. There's even a user-generated component where visitors can improve the data by claiming their home and suggesting better valuations. There's been some controversy about the accuracy of this data, but the basic principle still holds: an interactive, two-dimensional way of getting a sense of a neighborhood.
Or a sense of its finances, rather. For those of us who might be equally interested in a neighborhood's character, there are still more startups springing up. One such is the charmingly named Neighboroo, recently released in a very quiet Beta, which uses heatmaps (wherein a range of color gives you a sense of numerical scale) to display data about housing prices--and politics, air quality, crime, ethnicity, unemployment and other interesting demographic data.
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But can we overrely on it? A friend of mine just told me that she can't see the links on her own blog, ahd she finally realized it was her color blindness at fault. Color blindness is oft-forgoten but sometimes powerfully obstructive. I asked her if she liked the color-threading feature on Gmail, and while she isn't a regular user, she didn't even remember what I was talking about. She told me of her frustration with colorful PowerPoint slides wherin a deep red graph-line blends into a blue background. She said there are websites that let designers see what their websites look like to the color blind, but she can't tell if they work since they look the same to her regardless.
I just found Vischeck, but I also can't tell if it works--maybe this blog looks the same to a color blind person.
I remember once me and my sister were baffled in an emergency room--we came across a tall mult-drawered cabinet, each drawer a brilliant hue and covered in two labels--one for the contents, and one for the color! It was only later that I realized that if a non-colorblind Nurse shouted to a color blind nurse, "the stents are in the green drawer!" that hint might be useless without the additional labelling. Design is all about integrating form and function, but when the full range of function isn't entirely clear to the designer, aesthetics might beat out usefulness. Regardless, color is an important part of Web 2.0 and if we are going to regard all these widgets as real, useful tools we have to think about how useful they are to everyone.]]>