Mitch Ratcliffe writes about Swivel, a Web 2.0 site that combines YouTube with Microsoft Excel. Well, not exactly, but sort of.

It is an interesting idea, where you …

1. Upload your dataset to Swivel.
2. Share your data with other users.
3. Chart your data, making it available on the web.
4. Compare your data with the datasets from other users.

Interested? Here is a reasonable example and a not-so-reasonable example of what Swivel can do.

It was a little bid odd to me, at first. Why would I want to provide my data to a web site so that I could look at it the same way that I can on my own computer? Well, I can think of a couple of reasons …

Some Analysis

First, you can share your data with anyone who wants it. This sharing takes two parts, display and anaysis. You can display your data on the web, for everyone to see. Second, you can combine your data with the data that other people have uploaded and perhaps learn something that you didn’t already know.

Now, sharing might be good, and it might not be, depending on your point of view. An enterprise might want to keep it’s information secret, and that makes sense. However, an interesting thing about most data is that it is subject to the network effect, big time. Two unconnected data points might mean something, but you can’t really be sure. However, a hundred data points indicate a trend or a correlation.

Second, you can use a community to learn more about your own data, as well as your correlations. At the bottom of each page, there is a rating that gives a group evaluation of how related and comments about how useful the comparison actually is.

Overall

A site like this could be useful, especially if there could be a concerted effort to provide good information, such as the census, demographic, and geographic information from the US government. It is still in its very rough stages, and it hard to say how much value will come out of combining disparate data sets. Also, I security, information quality, and analysis will be a huge issue here. Still, an interesting idea.

Remember Internet Appliances? I mean products like like Microsoft’s WebTV or Oracle’s NIC? Take a look at this dated rundown of the market or read the press releases about them from Oracle or IBM if you want a good laugh. The IA market failed miserably, ultimately because it couldn’t deliver a significantly better experience than traditional computing, in terms of usability, functionality, or cost. While they did change the market (remember life before the $1000 PC) ultimately they couldn’t bring down costs low enough to compete against either traditional PC’s or embedded systems.

While this is worth discussing just for the schadenfreude, I actually have a reason for talking about this. I was reading a post about running an entire business on SaaS and another switching businesses to a Web 2.0 environment when it hit me like a ton of bricks. Web 2.0 is fulfilling the dream of internet appliances.

A stretch … perhaps. But bear with me. The idea behind IA’s was to provide super simple access to internet services and take away the complications of managing the desktop. Tell me that Google hasn’t taken a quantum leap in that direction with Search, GMail, Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, and Maps. Tell me that Yahoo hasn’t done the same with Flikr (I don’t use Yahoo much so I don’t know their products as well).

Web 2.0 is effectively turning the computer into an internet appliance where it makes sense, but without sacrificing the advantages of running a fully functioning machine. It is making it possible to actually run a business from the web. This is going to radically change the business environment, at least as much as the transition from the mainframe to the PC. I can’t wait to see how everything will shake out …

Well, I just got into the beta for Amazon’s EC2. I am pretty excited about it, as I have had some ideas about ETL and information quality that might be a nice fit for this architecture. While it isn’t distributed computing per se, it offers some very interesting opportunities around scalability, especially in working with data transformation.

I will try to get someting up and running this weekend. I am going to keep careful notes, and will try to add a step-by-step guide to help others get started. There is ample documentation on the AWS site, but I would like to do my part to make things a bit easier for newbies.

Links

• Getting Started With AWS — A step by step explanation of how to enroll and use the Amazon Web Services.
• Getting Started With S3 — My step by step walkthrough for setting up, connecting to, and using S3.
• Getting Started With EC2 — My step by step walkthrough for EC2.

Also, all of my postings are available in the AWS category, which will be updated regularly.

A couple of things in the hopper that caught my eye …

1. Recently, a kidnapped teen outsmarted her captor by using his cell phone to send a text message for help.
2. Most 10-year-olds have mobile phones, according to The Register.
3. An 18-year old recently graduated college in one year (with a double major in Math and Physics).
4. A professor at North Carolina State University was asked to remove podcasts of his lectures from a for-profit download service.

First and foremost, I am very glad that this poor girl was so clever and was able to free herself, and that most 10 year olds (at least in the UK) have a safety valve in the case of an emergency. Second, this college professor has NOTHING to do with kidnapping, so please don’t infer that from their inclusion on the same list.

When combined, these stories point me towards the ownership issues that are springing up around intellectual property, organizations, and infrastructure. Each of these begs the question, “Who really owns your infrastructure?” In a disconnected, paper-based world, it is easy to resolve these types of issues. Clearly, if you paid for it then it is yours. However, this is becoming more and more of an issue in our highly networked universe. The prevalence of appliances, mashups, and web services make it incredibly easy for people to connect the right people and things. It is (and will continue to be) easy to create things that hadn’t even been considered in the initial design of your infrastructure. So, if your best and brightest users are building things on top of your information architecture and using it to create new and useful things, are they the owners?

The addition of millenials makes this question a lot more interesting. Digital natives don’t have the same kind of ownership issues that are prevalent in today’s IT world. A progressive workplace is going to have to deal with these type of issues if they want to hire the best and brightest in order to be successful.

A little while back, Ingres and rPath announced Project Icebreaker the creation of a software appliance encompassing “the integration of the Ingres 2006 database with the Linux operating system”. In the past, I have always thought of appliances as being hardware related, but recent events have had me reconsidering this narrow definition. Under my old way of thinking I might have dismissed Icebreaker as something of a response to the difficulties of administering and maintaining a Linux system. However, some new developments have me thinking …

An applicance is the complete encapsulation of a business process, freeing the user to step back and look at the bigger picture. For a product like Netezza, this it pretty obvious that it is a complete RDBMS encapsulated in hardware black box. But, as hardware becomes more of a commodity, operating system configuration becomes more complicated, and virtualization becomes widespread, it makes sense that the definition of an appliance could migrate out of silicon.

Consider that Amazon Web Services are working on some very interesting projects, namely namely S3 (online storage) and EC2 (grid for rent). These projects have essentially abstracted the operation and maintenance of processing and storage. Icebreaker sounds ideal for this kind of enivronment. Thinking of the metaphor of the kitchen, it changes the role of the server from appliance to countertop.

OK, OK, this is just a jumble of random thoughts.  I have been trying all week to get these thoughts out and on to paper, pretty unsuccessfully.  The one thing I think I think is that there are some radical changes just over the horizon, based on the trends in web services, appliance-ization, and outsourcing.  Something big, something both familiar and new and unexpected.  I will have to think about this a bit more …