farblog

This is nice: the Google chart server — the thing that generates some of the charts used on Google Finance (and apparently also Google Video, though I’m not sure where) — is now publicly accessible, which means that anyone can add a snazzy-looking chart to a web page just by using the right URL (the chart data is encoded entirely in the URL).

For example, here’s the URL for a simple line chart (broken here into two lines for readability):

http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=lc&chs=480x270
&chd=t:1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100&chtt=f(x%C2%B2)

Which produces

Anyway, take a look at the Chart API developer’s guide for all the juicy details. While it’s not going to meet all your high-end enterprise charting needs, I bet we’ll see a bunch of cool applications soon enough.