I heard about Swivel from TechCrunch today.

"…Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually.

The number of page views your website generates. Or a stock price over time. Weather data. Commodity prices. The number of Bald Eagles in Washington state. Whatever. Uploaded data can be rated, commented and bookmarked by other users, helping to sort the interesting (and accurate) wheat from the chaff. And graphs of data can be embedded into websites. So it is in fact a bit like a YouTube for Data."

Looks like Swivel is going to become a way to present technical data and have others comment on it - perhaps making data (charts and graphs) become Social Media much as Online Videos have.

It's interesting to look at the way the uploaded data is going to be used:

"……. Swivel is putting significant computing power behind the scenes to run the data analysis. “We use farms of powerful computers and algorithms at the Swivel data centers to transform a lonely grid of numbers and letters into hundreds - sometimes thousands - of graphs that can be explored and compared with any other public data in Swivel.”"

So far, I'm not seeing anything quite like that on Swivel - but the platform is still in Beta.

I looked at the initial set of comments to the Techcrunch post and one concern is being able to separate quality data over junk (what else is new? - there's always a "noise" problem in data).  Another commenter figures community activists will use Swivel to figure out how pubic monies are spent.

Another person said that Swivel is but Web 2.0 hype.

Swivel sounds like an exciting idea but I'll have to play with it to really decide if it's useful to me.