Swivel - Social Sharing of Data

Mark Rittman

Dec 11, 2006 • 1 min read

Now this looks interesting. Swivel is a new site that aims to be the "Youtube of data", with a Flickr-like interface and a means for users to upload interesting sets of data and make them available for everyone to download. Once data is uploaded, you can match it up with other sets of data (global GDP vs. global temperature, wine consumption correlated with violent crime for example), graph it, and publish it for other to comment on. Neat.

There's some obvious applications for Swivel that immediately jump to mind. For a start, it's going to be the "internet archive for data", archiving and publishing interesting data sets for (hopefully) quite a few years to come. It'll be very useful for doing ad-hoc correlations, which certainly interests the undercover economist in me. From a personal perspective, it looks like quite a good source of demo data, and I can certainly see it being used in a few Web 2.0 mashups - with the obvious first application being some sort of link-up with Google Maps. It'll be interesting to see how this one develops.

Sign up for more like this.