Swivel Preview now available for ‘YouTube for data’ |
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Yesterday Techcrunch previewed a new service that the co-founders billed as “YouTube for data” but when I visited the site all I saw was a “coming soon” message. Since TC indicated Swivel would be launched this week. I bookmarked and started checking back. Late yesterday I refreshed but nothing had changed.
This morning I refreshed and saw a different front page saying that the “preview was coming” and a link to a tour at the top of the page (pictured above). I followed that link and discovered a working Swivel signup link — woohoo — I filled it out and got in right away, no confirmation required.
Uploading and sharing your data
The first thing to do is upload some data which can only be shared publically during the preview. In the future a fee-based Swivel Pro version will be available where you can upload and keep data private but right now your only choice is to upload data that is shared with the masses.
I decided for a test to use the monthly post numbers here at Hmm that can be found on the homepage in the right column as of this writing.
STEP 1. Create. I quickly whipped up a spreadsheet using Google Spreadsheets with two columns: month and number of posts and then went to FILE->EXPORT as CSV (comma separated value) and saved the page to my desktop.
STEP 2. Upload. Inside Swivel I browsed to the desktop, located the CSV file and uploaded.
STEP 3. Preview data. Does the format of the data look right?
STEP 4. Confirm data types. Make sure the column types are correct. In my example, column one is date and the second column is number of posts for the month.
STEP 5. Set title and description. This step also integrates with Flickr for choosing a picture to go along with data via a built-in Flickr search engine on the page. I might have missed it, but didn’t see an upload or web link form, only the Flickr option. (update: later after this process you can edit with a non-Flickr image location).
STEP 6. Explore. This is the fun, interactive part where others view, rate, leave comments and can share the data elsewhere.
A metrics section displays that the lowest posting month was December 2003 (40 posts), the higest (149) on June 2005 and the average 92 posts, about 3 posts every day.
Swivel offer comparative data types like comparing the number of monthly Hmm posts to San Francisco temperature:
By clicking on the “blog” link you can copy and embed the graph in your webpage/blog as I’ve done above in a wide variety of sizes: sparkline (40px wide), small (120px), medium (400px), large (600px), huge (900px) or custom defined dimensions.
You can also “add to your favorites” the generated graph.
Summary and initial thoughts
Swivel borrows generously from the YouTube feature set, easy to use and generates results that can quickly be shared. The YouTube comparison by the co-founders is wishful thinking at this point but people who are sitting on data and would like to compare to something else will find this interesting.
Swivel is a nice complimentary service for Google Docs & Spreadsheets and I wonder if they built this with being a future Google acquistion in mind? Whatever the creator’s intentions, this is a service to watch and play around with going forward. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I like what I’ve seen so far. Nice work, Swivel team.
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Great news, because I like this service very much. I think Swivel is going to help me to boost my youtube experience.
Thank you for sharing this great story with me !
Comment by Rita loves pictures — December 6, 2006 @ 9:55 am PST
TDavid,
Thanks for the excellent walkthrough of Swivel — I really glad to see you were able to get your data in and you liked the experience. Keep that data coming!
Best regards,
Dmitry Dimov
Product Chief & Cofounder
http://www.swivel.com
Comment by Dmitry Dimov — December 6, 2006 @ 3:07 pm PST
This is great — I was just about to start looking for something like this. Next year I will attempt to reengineer myself into a lighter and more healthy “Jeff Barr 2.0″ and I want to publicly track my weight loss. Looks like Swivel will do the trick!
Comment by Jeff Barr — December 6, 2006 @ 8:46 pm PST
[…] Swivel - Innovative Data Monopoly Published December 7th, 2006 in blog, data, information and networking. Swivel, though in preview/beta mode, just recently gained a lot of attention for their new data site. Swivel displays user uploaded data nice and visually for you to see and grasp. According to Michael Arrington covering the story at TechCrunch explains how this tool will be in demand by analysist’s (number crunching researchers) on the one side. And at the same time provides entertaining comparisons for just about anything. Blogs have commented that Swivel may become the Internet Archive for Data. However this could be of concern, if one site controls almost all data, user rated or not, this could be abused for economical or political gain. The possibility of errors and complete incorrect data will widely be present, regardless of the fact that users would have to rate the data for it to gain public opinion. What makes thousands of voters/ratings qualified or educated to determine the quality of the data? All you readers and the rest of the internet population, will likely have some of the same questions. The uncertainty the questions leave may effect the trust that Swivel data will be given. Nodalities also sees the dangers. Finishing I would like to mention some more of the pros. Users will more easily have access to data. Your data can contribute to some interesting observations and realizations. Data can more easily be understood and deciphered. Make You Go Hmm has a nice demo of how Swivel works. You should however take a look at Swivel.com and try it out for yourself, before agreeing with me. Because most comments about Swivel at the moment are “at a first glance”. A real review of Swivel will take several months of testing and comparing, but the potential to meet their goal to become the YouTube of data is definitely a possibility. […]
Pingback by Swivel - Innovative Data Monopoly at stepheno.net — December 7, 2006 @ 7:39 am PST
[…] Things That Make You Go Hmm:Swivel Preview now available for ‘YouTube for data’ - “Swivel is a nice complimentary service for Google Docs & Spreadsheets and I wonder if they built this with being a future Google acquistion in mind? Whatever the creator’s intentions, this is a service to watch and play around with going forward. Give it a try and let me know what you think.“ […]
Pingback by Jeff Barr’s Blog » Links for Thursday, December 7, 2006 — December 7, 2006 @ 10:36 am PST
Good luck with Jeff Barr 2.0, lol, I like that Jeff
Comment by TDavid — December 7, 2006 @ 10:38 am PST
[…] - (most) Bloggers aren’t journalists, stop with the assumption already (3) [dec 5] - Apple needs Nintendo to counter Microsoft (5) [dec 5] - Swivel Preview now available for ‘YouTube for data’ (6) [dec 3] - R.I.P James Kim (4) [dec 6] - Akismet et al erroneously flagging trackbacks from Hmm as SPAM, not HAM (19) [dec 7] “Oh, and I’ll have to say that I did write twice on the comment section for help on fixing Akismet for MT a while back. No one from Automattic got back to me (before when I reported just an Akismet issue, Matt wrote back like right away).” – Comment by darkmoon — December 7, 2006 @ 11:27 pm […]
Pingback by Hmmcast #30: Unplugged » Make You Go Hmm — January 1, 2007 @ 11:35 am PST