Many Eyes: IBM's Collaborative/Social Visualization Site

Just as we are getting used to the innovation that Swivel represents in terms of socializing data analysis and visualization, IBM has announced Many Eyes. It has many of the same features as Swivel, in fact, the intention behind the site seems very similar.

I've not yet really explored the site, but I've seen a number of different visualization formats including maps, time series and tree maps.

O'Reilly Radar has more coverage including some discussion with the creators of the site:

You also asked if we see our site as "Swivel for visualization". That phrase isn't quite accurate (any more than Swivel is "Many Eyes for data" ;-). Both our site and Swivel are examples of a broader phenomenon, which we call "social data analysis," where playful, social exploration of data leads to serious analysis. At the same time the two sites fall on different ends of a spectrum. Swivel seems to have some neat data mining technology that finds correlations automatically. By contrast, we've placed our emphasis on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. My guess is that both approaches will be successful because social data analysis is a powerful idea.

Thanks to Emily Halverson for the heads up.