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Here’s a classic timeline that is/was ahead of it’s time. Is that possible?

The Baby Name Voyager has helped countless folks follow trends dealing with boys and girls names. At it’s core, it’s a tool that allowed users to type in a name and dynamically watch that name’s popularity trends over the last 120 years. If you prefer, you can choose ALL and see a wavy graphic of all the names over time. From here you can easily scroll over the pink and blue ‘trend’ lines to see the corresponding names. The visualization is surprisingly easy to use assuming you have to have a decent computer that can render quickly.

The Baby Name Voyager has faithfully served as a high quality example of a progressive timeline’s usefulness.

Of note is the use of Java (versus Flash or Ajax), which I’ve been told is especially adept at handling larger quanitities of information . We’ll check in on this at a later date.