Just came back from Tableau Conference 2022 at Las Vegas. What an exciting event! The most exciting thing is reuniting with old friends and meeting with the datafam people known online for years.

Attended first time the Tableau Visionary summit. It's a great opportunity for meeting other visionaries, Tableau/Salesforce PMs and executives.

During the summit, one executive (sorry I am terrible with names) challenged us with a question: how to increase the number of tableau users by 1 million?

This rang a bell within me. I guess I have the solution to that! Frankly speaking, I have been imagining a social media platform built around data vizzies for years. To me, data viz is a media type by itself, just like video, image, sound, and text. Even PowerPoint has its own social platform: SlideShare.net. So, data viz deserves a social platform of its own. Let's call it Tableau Social.

What is Tableau Social?

It's a social media platform where people share vizzing activities (publish, update), discover vizzies and interact with authors/viewers (like, share, comment).

Why Tableau Social?

Currently Tableau communities are mostly active in Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Blog sphere, Tableau Forum and Tableau Public. Each of them has somewhat different functionalities and utilities. Tableau Social would be the one place that aggregates the links to content scattering around in various platforms.

How does Tableau Social work?

It works like your familiar timeline with a focus on vizzies. It's the Instagram for vizzies. Or shall we call it InstaViz.

One can follow his/her favorite vizzers!

One can like, comment any viz of interest.

One can share/forward any viz of interest within Tableau Social or to other social platforms.

Where to start?

The version zero can be built upon Tableau Public: 

- Add like and and comment functions to every viz.

- Add a timeline user interface in addition to the current tiled one.

Build a Magnet

I believe, with Tableau Social/InstaViz, we can achieve multi million tableau users faster than any other type of marketing campaign. And it's a sustainable platform for a long time to come. More importantly, it's a magnet that will attract those who are interested in the data visualization revolution.