Life & Research Notes

It starts out as a concept, honed through conversation and whiteboard discussions, then dispersed among the team as tasks. Each person creates their piece, and we have a collection of items, little seeds, each fragile and weak, undependable. But we follow the plan, and we keep building layer upon layer, and the stack grows, sometimes collapses in on itself, but new growth comes out of it. Attention flows to the weak spots, and they expand and become stronger, and the parts begin to unify, and to connect and complement one another. It’s a process of continual creation, critique, and adaptation, all happening simply by intellect alone, by collectively willing those little bits to dance in just the right way.

This Monday I’ll join up full-time with Swivel, a social data aggregation, analysis and publishing platform. They are a startup in downtown SF, and I’ll be acting in a dual role as both designer and engineer, collaborating with some very talented developers to push the app to the next phase.

I actually learned about these guys quite a while back, as data aggregation and visualization was an area of interest for me when I applied to the lab, and when they got their first round of press I definitely noticed them. It’ll be fun to pick back up on this trail, well armed with my PLW and ML experiences. Eventually Swivel aims to act as an open bazaar of data, not only of static sets as it is now, but also live, dynamic feeds via the upcoming API. On top of the core services, they are also working on publishing tools for people to weave the data into consumable narratives.

No doubt the web industry is hot again, and I’ve seen a lot of interesting opportunities. Yet since I first contacted them, Swivel has solidly stood out from the crowd with an original and powerful underlying idea, combined with a fun, fast, smart, hard-working, and cohesive team. Needless to say I’m excited to dive in to the tasty data goodness.

Update: Swivel is also in the news today with pieces on TechCrunch and O’Reilly Radar about their recent success at the OECD World Forum.