Swivel

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

Comments

[Beth Kanter]

Hi Ed,

Was thinking about you as I'm getting ready to take off for a week of conferences, including NTC. I thought Swivel was really cool

Beth

[Peter Caputa]

At first blush, I was thinking "What? Social networks and graphs? What crack are they smokin?". But, after checking out the site, the engineer in me creeped out and I realized how addictive it is to look at all that data. Fun stuff.

Can't help but think the business is just a feature, though.

[Ed Batista]

Thanks, Beth--say hi to our old friends for me!

And I don't disagree with you, Pete. But when anything's addictive, it's capturing attention, and as we well know, that's a good a basis as any (you could say it's the *only* basis) for building a business. I'm not saying Swivel will succeed as a stand-alone service, but I think they could. (Hope all's going well!)

Ed