Google’s Visualization API

Launched yesterday, the visualization API is closely tied to iGoogle and Google Docs.

A fun game to play whenever Google launches something: “How Will This Help To Make Advertising More Relevant?” For example, the Google Maps API provides geographic location. Ad Manager provides results of ads ran by other parties.

I doubt that the visualization API is there just to make Google Docs or iGoogle a bit better. So what does the Visualization API add to advertising effectiveness? Could the new structured data brought in from third parties improve ad relevance? The API will support custom data sources in the future, so perhaps this is a way to gain access to data that can be reused in ads themselves?

Examples of visualizations are in the gallery.