Microsoft Launches Pivot, A Radically New Visualization of Online Objects
Microsoft Live Labs' latest creation has just launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks impressive and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.
Microsoft's Live Labs has been the source of a few interesting projects: a 3D photo-stitcher called PhotoSynth, a bookmarking service called Thumbtack (which was shuttered just this month). Typically, the UIs have been slick, but user adoption has lagged.
The official demo video was pretty cool, but is proving unembeddable. Instead, take a look at this onstage demo from Neowin:
In short, datasets are organized as collections. Results can be as granular or as big-picture as the user desires, and correlations and patterns are easy to see and examine through powerful but simple visualizations. Imagine browsing through thumbnails representing Kiva loans, then sorting the loans by the different types of businesses they helped established. Or, on a nerdier note, think about riffling through decks of Magic: The Gathering cards, zooming in for larger-than-life detail of the card's artwork and then zooming out to see how each was related or linked to others in the set.
This probably reminds you - as it did us - a lot of Wikipedia. But imagine Wikipedia as an infinitely scannable, shuffleable, expandable, retractable, linked, and yet still detachable deck of digital cards; and then you have an inkling of how Pivot looks and feels.
Collections can be created by anyone, including third-party developers. Types of collections include simple, linked, and dynamic, which are each progressively more difficult to create. Developers are also encouraged to create collections from existing online datasets, such as the Internet Archive or data.gov.
It's very exciting, indeed; and it's available for Windows users only at the moment. Mac users, we're sorry. Why don't you go write some complaint letters on your beautifully designed, virus-immune machines? We'd love to rub it in some more by posting a few screenshots with gloating captions, but we're too busy trying to get this machine to stop being so Windows-y and just run the software
Right now, the service is invitation-only. We encourage you to Google around for your invite codes or check in here later to see if the kind folks at Live Labs have passed along any to us.
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Sounds like Microsoft's answer to social tools that are out there. The way they're letting third party developers create things is interesting. If you can't stop the open source movement why not join it right?
Very cool. You can check out the official (now unembeddable) video on www.getpivot.com
is it related at all or in part inspired by pivot tables in excel?
Am I the only one that finds it funny that the writer asks us to Google invites for a Microsoft product? =P
So, recently Google "stole" the brand name Go for their programming language, and now Microsoft is stealing the brand name Pivot from a rather popular CMS/blogging platform and a stickfigure animator ...
Bah, Macintosh users are not really left out since both VMWare Fusion and Parallel Desktop run Windows 7 emulation, and very efficiently so. Having either of these PC emulators is a must since they basically allow you to have two machines for the price of one. Can't do it the other way around...
Microsoft, I believe, used the word "pivot" before blogging even existed. Also, they acquired a startup that was doing polyhierarchic visualization almost ten years ago, and I would not be surprised if the founders are among those who are running the Pivot project; in fact, I seem to remember that they were already using the word pivot to refer to the polyhierarchic transforms then.
This is a really cool concept and as seen on the Video on the MS Live Labs website, reading WikiPedia via Pivot would be fun!
Minimum requirements for installation are Windows Vista or Windows 7 OS with Windows "Aero" Enabled.
As for invites, you can of course request for them via email. But the nice guys at liveside.net are tweeting some Install codes/Invites on their twitter account twitter.com/liveside.
And If you wanna stay updated about such great stuff, Follow me at twitter.com/vikitech ! ;-)
Sorry to gloat (which I AM doing) but I managed to blag myself an invite to this and downloaded it about 12 hours ago.
Under the covers the slice-n-dice is nothing new (although it seems pretty quick) but what really sets it apart is the gorgeous (and genuinely useful) visualisation and transitions.
Not yet sure if they allow jumping from collection to collection (e.g. Jump from a collection of actors to a collection of films) but if not I hope that will come. I would agree that visualising Wikipedia is a killer scenario here. Sports stats are another.
-Jamie
:-) I think that Google jab may have been in response to not getting an invitation or an embeddable vid..
Hm. How is this substantively different than what has been possible with Adobe Flex for the past couple years? Well, perhaps the Seadragon image zooming thing, but other than that, is there a breakthrough here?
@karl...
Comparing Flex to Pivot is like to compare Firefox browser to google.com. It’s possible to create a product like Pivot using Flex, but Flex does not create visualizations of information collections by itself.
I see. So Pivot is a browser which focuses primarily on faceted search and is capable of parsing web content by itself… without the use of Pivot-friendly microformatting? Now, that *would* be a breakthrough.
@Karl
No, it doesn't parse "web content" in its existing form. However, it's a completely data-driven app, meaning you don't need to write any code to get your content into it (or more likely, you write a bit of conversion / output code on your server in whatever language you prefer which outputs the data you already have - similar to how sites generate RSS / Atom / RDF / whatever ouput).
It's really curious (suspicious?) that you mentioned Adobe Flex in this context, since you might as well have said ("...than what's possible in [WPF, Silverlight, C++, C, Objective C, Cocoa, Direct3D, Chrome, IE, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc) since building an application of this sort is clearly possible in any of those.
Is that last dog breed a Papillon?
Hehe. No, not suspicious at all. It's just that I've developed an XML-driven faceted search product browser for a CPG client using Flex in the past, and I was trying to understand what Pivot's advantage for me and my clients could be. Don't get me wrong, it looks very slick, I just wasn't seeing the "radically new visualization" part.
Hm. How is this substantively different than what has been possible with Adobe Flex for the past couple years? Well, perhaps the Seadragon image zooming thing, but other than that, is there a breakthrough here?
Comparing Flex to Pivot is like to compare Firefox browser to google.com. It’s possible to create a product like Pivot using Flex, but Flex does not create visualizations of information collections by itself.
Hehe. No, not suspicious at all. It's just that I've developed an XML-driven faceted search product browser for a CPG client using Flex in the past, and I was trying to understand what Pivot's advantage for me and my clients could be. Don't get me wrong, it looks very slick, I just wasn't seeing the "radically new visualization" part.
I see. So Pivot is a browser which focuses primarily on faceted search and is capable of parsing web content by itself… without the use of Pivot-friendly microformatting? Now, that *would* be a breakthrough.