YThingSpeak in the Wild: Exploring 38K Visualizations of IoT Data

Cloud services are vital tools for storing, analyzing, and responding to data collected by sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT). With ThingSpeak, a popular web platform that provides these services, users can easily create cloud "channels" to receive, host, and visualize sensor data. In this study, we scrape public channels from 6,511 users to construct a comprehensive picture of both the ThingSpeak developer community and their applications. We release this data to support future work. From this data, we examine 37,989 visualizations and uncover relationships between application domains and visualization techniques utilized. Further, we investigate how ThingSpeak's interface impacts user design choices. To learn which channels most successfully disseminate information, we explore design patterns on channels "liked" on Facebook or discussed in ThingSpeak forums. Finally, we briefly comment on how services like ThingSpeak can better support users' needs moving forward.