Many Eyes is an apt name for a tool that centers on graphics, but its power also lies in bringing together many brains and hearts, much information and creativity. The procrastination potential is huge, but once you get past the graphs of gasoline prices and biblical names and maps of other users’ Facebook networks, you’ll notice Many Eyes has much deeper aspirations and potential.

Many Eyes offers a plethora of simple, free data visualization tools, ranging from relatively new and graphically striking word clouds to more traditional bar graphs and pie charts, all of which make it easier to analyze and represent just about any data in interesting ways. But the site’s real innovation comes by encouraging users to share, use, experiment with and comment on each other’s data and visualizations.

“Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns,” according to the website, developed by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Lab (CUE). “Our goal is to ‘democratize’ visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.”

Sample Visualizations from Many Eyes

Click the icons below to enlarge images and interact.