IBM Research has been doing some cool things for a while in the social software space (see IBM’s Social Software Initiatives from 2005 ). Now they have developed Many Eyes. Their sites says, “Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to “democratize” visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.” It was created by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group. They have a Many Eyes blog.

On the blog they show an interesting comparison of the text in the US Presidential state of the union addresses in 2002 and 2003. You seen the relative tag clouds for each text with side by side color coded comparisons to see how terms rose or shrunk from one text to the next.

I found it especially interesting that they have a Many Eyes Facebook application. The application helps you collect, format and prepare social network data and visualize it on Many Eyes. I wonder how many of the other big players are putting apps on Facebook?