Free Your Data and The Rest Will Follow

I’ve been meaning to write about Swivel for a while. I mentioned the site to someone today as a cool site and used it to generate some ideas for a presentation. Both of those things jogged my memory to write this post.

Swivel is a site which allows you to free your data and allow you to graph and chart any data that you upload. Why is that unique? It’s unique because charts and graphs are generated on the fly and can be changed on the fly. Doesn’t sound too unique, does it? Well what if you could also use any data that other people uploaded as well? And what if any data you uploaded could be used by others as well? Well, that has the makings of a giant data mashup of huge proportions. That’s exactly what Swivel is. Oh did I mention, doing all of this is free.

So how, pray tell do these guys expect to make any money. Is it all eyeballs and advertising? Well, there may be advertising on the site but I wouldn’t know it (thanks Adblock Plus!). I turned off my blocking extension and it doesn’t seem like there are ads on the site. Instead, the team behind Swivel has said that any data you upload and want to keep private will incur a fee. Seems fair. If you participate in the community, good for you and no charge. If you don’t, that’s okay but you pay for the privilege.

Really, this whole idea is a way to generate lots of traffic by providing something of value (free access to data and graphing) while paying the bills via a small portion of the community. The company is backed by private investment and has already caused other people to adapt to them. Dabble DB (whom I’m unimpressed by and I’ll explain why in another post) has introduced a free feature largely, I believe, because of the adoption success of Swivel.

At heart, I’m a data junky (check out this graph of how your tax dollars were spent in 2006). Digital Envoy was built on the mass analysis of data. Other projects I did at companies prior to Digital Envoy also revolved around analysis of massive amounts of data (I’ve done some wicked things in Excel if I do say so myself).

So take a look at Swivel and free your data. The rest of us will enjoy mashing up everything you upload.