Love to see a timeline of world history. I have no idea as to how that would work. When you are "zoomed out" do you get clumped eras like "Victorian" or "Age of Enlightenment"? Or since those are region-specific, does it just give you the regular spacing and boringness of "centuries"? Perhaps region does need to figure into the timeline so for the European belt you could still go with "Industrial Revolution" or "Edwa…
> You ought to be able to zoom in
IMO history is so complicated, and timelines do not do justice to the nuances.
Being more familiar to us (as contemporaries), what about timelines of recent news? (Wikipedia current events [1], or even HN?). it helps to visualize the bigger picture for those who don't follow very close (which is healthier these days)
Beyond zooming, filtering will also help declutter the UI.
FYI There are already nice open-source timelines widgets like https://github.com/NUKnightLab/TimelineJS3 and http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/