Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

[LLit11]

isnt that highly impracticable? and, though being an interesting talk, its reeks of advertising and should not have been featured at TED

[saijai587]

Thank you for sharing TedtalksDirector

[kopi5896]

Good video.

[minami935]

Yes it is a pivot turning point for web exploration.

[devilninjas]

boring... its already there. this guy looks like living in dinosaur's world

[MUR4DHD]

that smart

[BOWENSblog]

Last year I asked for a good laptop.

I got a mac book pro as a gift... but i threw it down the stairs because I was pissed off because It was an apple product.

[wasimsworld]

Our brain works with association anyway so in a sense viewing information like this is more natural.

[noamkos]

Brilliant idea: I loved the talk and got so excited... went on the website and now I'm pissed off with Microsoft AGAIN:

>> when I clicked Download, I expected to download Piovt, not Microsoft Silverlight!! I did install it in the hope to use Pivot but Pivot is not yet available!!!

This is yet another Mircosoft way to shove down our throat their crap products! What RUBBISH MARKETING! I hate this company's attitude... why not say upfront on the website: wait till summer for download?

[clicchick]

?

i was able to download pivot

are you sure your system is compatible?

[nathanaelawrence]

@noamkos

1. The Pivot *client* has been available for download since November 2009.

2. The Pivot *client* is only for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

3. When the Pivot *control* ships for Silverlight 4 this summer (which they do say right on the site) it will work on modern Macs, on Windows xp, etc. etc.

4. The 'Download Now' button links directly to the installation file for the Pivot client. You need only Silverlight to watch the videos on the site.

[pwiattitto]

microsoft pivot - "windows xp is not supported"

i'm already starting lose interest!

[nathanaelawrence]

@pwiattitto Just wait for the Silverlight 4 version that's coming out this summer. It'll work for you.

Honestly, you should think about buying an operating system that isn't 9 years old now, though.

[pwiattitto]

@nathanaelawrence

I like the (yet unrivalled by any other microsoft os) stability and reliability of XP SP3.

And I don't believe in the constant replacement of OS's as a prerequisit of modern day computing.

If or When I make my next hardware upgrade, I will still use XP ...for the gaming side of things.

[ehhhhhhhhhh]

Recommended System Configuration: Windows 7 with Aero enabled, 2-GHz 32-bit (x86) processor, 2 gigabytes of random access memory.

DANG

[ehhhhhhhhhh]

The "transcribed audio" at 5:33 hahahahahaha

[Sazuck]

using XP+Firefox => can't use it... damn

[jeru18]

what a waste of space, to save all historys.....

[Quicksplint]

5:35 transcribed audio lol

[leejw00t354]

What a beautiful UI

[GrimSoul66]

Just DL'd the program, and I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but I've gota say it. Because this is going to be great for porn browsing.

[grofuss]

Lol, that's a good point.

[C0mBineD]

what a sweaty man

[dryan22]

Excellent observation!

[BaileysBeads]

Generalism at it's finest. Awesome.

[strappinggermanlad]

can't wait to look at all the porn sites i visited by categories!

[egalmannen]

@strappinggermanlad hahahaha word

[CablloBlanco]

Looking forward to trying this. Very impressive.

[NexusTen]

信息的统计让隐私更容易暴露

CPU占用非常高相对于chrome与opera10.5

很多功能华而不实

[DigitalAssassin]

This is a clever UI.

To make a clever UI useful, you need some form of automatic data entry, or a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards.

If his research is conceptual, and all this data was entered by hand? Then this is almost completely useless. If pivot can index & tag data on its own (besides just history and stuff), then it's revolutionary.

Realistically, you have to program an 'interpreter' for each data source, and for that you need a lot of programmers.

Interesting anyway!

[LokiClock]

Well, not exactly. You could of course also employ the world sweatshop, like most tagging systems, to do it for you.

[ChrisSketch]

If you can't see the advantage of this program, you're obviously not writing very many research papers.

[cpt203]

@ChrisSketch Most people dont.

[gpirvan]

useless piece of crap!

[loosernama]

now this is something...

[pjpinc123]

awesome!

[thomasausderwelt]

imagine school classes using this... the amount of time saved on useless archiving and offline searching. incredible progress.

[Durchbrechen]

where can I download it ? Please....

[baaxyz]

@Durchbrechen getpivot com

[Durchbrechen]

Thank you very much, baaxyz

[vasniltere]

I wonder how long it would take me to pick up on browsing/searching/filtering/w­hatever in that sort of way. At the moment, navigating that way is not intuitive to me. sorry.

[a11acce55]

Way COOL! Hate to use an overused phrase but this could really be a "killer app" if properly developed and introduced. This'll free the general public from biased "research" of the mainstream media and at last let one draw relevant conclusions one wants from the ocean of data out there. This along with geoblogging (do a search on that) promise to reveal nuggets of true knowledge/wisdom impossible to find any other way. Keep us posted on further developments of this, Flake!

[wevenhuis]

This is not only amazing stuff, but a potential powerful research tool. However, how does data input work when you use it for the first task. Is it still a laborious task of individual data input, or can one use keywords to search and pull data from the web? Can we select between confounding data and valid and trustworthy and unbiased data? Can influence the search algorhythms to also search the deep layers of the Internet?

[audiowiz]

"You're not browsing, you're not searching".... yeah you're filtering...

[audiowiz]

I'm so glad we can fast forward through the TED intro.....after the 40th listen it's a sharp pain

[t3tsuyaguy1]

By his noodley appendage! They created a data browser based on the inner workings of my mind!

[jxguy]

WWOOWW . . . that's awesome . . . doing research on the web is going to be real easy . . . now what's going to stop anyone from knowing anything.

Is it important who own what, and how the application was developed? Every component existed and cooperatively merge together to bring it to manifestation. We might never see this if 1 of the component stubbornly refuse to cooperate.

[hobgoblins6]

to be clear i was not saying microsoft didn't have any good products. It just seems to me they stole the idea's for making the products.

perhaps someone could provide an innovation that microsoft created?

[Crunch0r]

I got one for you, it comes from the TED-talk I remembered a few weeks/months ago:

/watch?v=NCPzji_-2Oo&feature=c­hannel

[t3tsuyaguy1]

Some might ask whether it is more important to have an idea, or to do something with it.

[hobgoblins6]

i agree with you that development is important, but ted is about ideas.

[t3tsuyaguy1]

Touche.

It does make me wonder if there is not value in development being shared at TED. Seeing what someone has done with one idea, will sometimes inspire others.

[dropinaduce]

COOL STUFF!!!!

[izzypippin35]

@tavmaister

well what if you need to get a report done in 5 hours?

it will be quicker to use collections to find information quickly than painstakingly find the info through the web. And i am giving the labs a little hope for this project.

[epatton1001]

giving the internet TAGs

[tavmaister]

yea great, ideas for lazy and stupid people, l2browse.

[writetokinshuk]

I don't work for MSFT and I hate most of their products (except Office - which is a great tool)

But this product is awesome. I have to say that sometimes MSFT is great in fundamental research (MS surface is another example)

[code933k]

@writetokinshuk Office sucks too whenever you realize how documents should be edited, spreadsheets calculated and "WEB" presentations programmed...

Summarizing: All M$ crap is useless

[zeffii]

@code933k really? or are you just a generalizing dip shit?

[code933k]

@zeffii That depends on

1.) How many big programs do you have developed

2.) How many public protocols do you know and, finally

3.) Do you confuse strangling poor people with philantropy?

[zeffii]

I happen to like using Windows. A statement such as "All ms crap is useless" must be ranked as unproductive.

[hobgoblins6]

Why does ted cover microsoft so much considering microsoft would have to have the lowest original ideas to market capitalization ratio of any company in history. teds reputation is taking a huge hit for this. Hope you guys are getting enough funding to make it worth it!

[pip1980]

WANT !

[smokeystriper]

this commercial brought to you by Microsoft. " wow that's great . Were can I send my money?" This has no business on a TED talk.

[sbh123yt]

I don't working for MS, Apple, Google or any other competitor.

I find this tool great. Easy to use and it gives a very comfort way to find the information I want to know.

The only question is how fast it will run on my computer. If this is not the issue, I would like to have it on my PC.

[quosmo1]

pffft : this is hardly deserving of TED.

there is nothing special here.

[CraigusMalaigus]

If you consider the Wikipedia example, viewing with Pivot is not that different to just browsing Wikipedia itself. Say you went to Barack Obama, you saw he one the Nobel Peace Prize, you then click on the wiki article for Nobel Peace Prize and see a list of the winners. It's really not that difficult.

[anotherelvis]

The news is that they created a nice way of visualizing a dataset with lots of metadata. It is probably not new, but I would like wkipedia to have an interface like this.

[burningeko]

the amount of meta data would be rather large, adding tags to everything would take longer than conveniently scanning an image. also the more data that you are reliant on the more redundancy etc you get. it'd be great if the internet was an organized place and there were standards. as well as people working full time to make sure all tags were right. pivot just ruined all conventional web design.

[chriskindle]

I want to know this as well. Did anyone try?

[spacecoke]

looks quite flashy for browsing but i would always end up just going back to typing what i want in the search box.

[wickedinsight]

@spacecoke i agree

[LordNapalm]

It;s neat.. but it's not revolutionary. It's just a high end sorting GUI. I can't see many more uses for it than he's demonstrated here. Would be fun on a mobile device.. but looks like it needs a lot of hardware,

[dragonstorm83]

I'm unimpressed by this. It better be free cause I ain't buying it O_O

[patricknelson]

Funny they're now trying to aggregate and display Wikipedia articles using this nice fancy interface. All of that coming long after Microsoft failed miserably with their product: Encyclopedia Encarta. Sorry, but I feel like they've taken a dumbed down version of Flash (Silverlight) and have attempted to promote it with these sweet looking animated charts, innovating by simplifying mountains of data... How grandiose! Doesn't quite count as being innovative or breakthrough... does it?

[joe80dman]

Most corporate entities would love this. They love having a plethora of grafts at their fingertips. State functionaries would like this, too.

[freeraynman]

So this is like Google Images but more advanced??

Where is this data all compiled? Is this pre-arranged data and simply tagged so that the program can just search the tags in the database? How does the program know where to go to get all the covers of sports illustrated? Does it just do it on the spot on the internet like google, yahoo and all the other search engines? Cause if it does it's pretty kewl!! Just a new way to google stuff:P

[hockeybum90n5]

wow this is fantastic :O

[Hamandchees3]

no, pivot is a stick figure animation program.

[xGundamz]

Damnit, i wanna see m00t in ted already.

[AlgeKalipso]

I don´t know... the attempts of microsoft to present an innovative face to the impressionable public?

[pooflo123]

@AlgeKalipso If they keep attempting then we keep getting better and better stuff.

[ErikeRKK]

Haha, the audio to text translation program translated "drowning in data" to "drowning in gay media" at 5:34. Technology is awesome!

[MRSketch09]

@Vid

The curse of to much data or information? That's never been a issue for me.

I like the web the way it is. But that is a cool little application none the less.

[berzma]

visualizing information!!

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

THis program can't run on windows xp... only vista and 7 :(

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

This is excellent :D

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

nevermind... I found it

[TheReasonWhyGuy]

is this a website?

where?

what?

how do I get to it?

[IH8WRONGPPL]

kind of.... dare I say, a "flake"

[watzupdawg]

I want Pivot for the Stock market and find out the new headlines that came with price changes. .

[BigO8872]

I feel like this wouldn't be something to use on an everyday basis, but I can see how it might be useful for making connections. Google might be faster when looking for specific information, but this seems to be giving you the questions to ask. It might be cool, or then it might be a flop, but I would like to try it out.

[MrTStoddart]

This is the way Shakespeare has always been studied (on one level, anyway), using a painstakingly-gathered concordance.

[LikeAPossum]

yawn

[Valstein0]

I think this is the natural progression for the internet to go. I don't think it's groundbreaking or drastically different, but it needs to happen this way. Things need to be more visual and more accessible, and this Pivot seems to be a perfect way to go.

[pakratmak]

I see numerous comments about practical uses for this.

I can think of a couple immediately.

Economics and fact checking.

Maybe after we use it, more will become apparent.

I'm excited about the possibilities with this personally.

[miggyb89]

It's neat, but I can't think of a practical application for it. Essentially, it's a giant metadata browser, which seems neat, but the metadata seems to be put in and managed manually, which makes it less useful.

For example, if someone wanted to write an article and mention how many times Armstrong has been in Times, you could either use this program, or use Google manually and find all the resulting issues in about the same time :)

[cpt203]

@miggyb89 Agree wholeheartedly. Kind of like a bicycle for a fish> neat concept, but not exactly practical.

[celshader]

@ballyhairs I expect to see it used on many a CSI episode.

[reafdaw01]

What is the use of this?

Who would use it...

it's like photosynth: kind of cool to look at but useless.

[chi9ja]

@reafdaw01

it could serve as a powerful market research tool.

[juanmisimo]

I like it

[Loserido]

Semi-impressed.

[munsking]

pffft more useless windows bullshit... seems like they're going towards mac now.. yeeeeey useless apps :D

funny though, the linux foks actually make usefull stuff but most people think linux is bull.

[code933k]

Such a great technology in Bill Gates hands? I cannot believe that! It will suck by the time it's pushed towards public.

[Mastikator]

What are you talking about? Microsoft rules man

[Hedning1390]

How does this work, and how is it any different from any search engine (except the graphics of course)?

[PSK11489]

It's like a search aggregate and sorter.

[Poisonfrogg]

pretty cool ap

[Saerain]

It's funny. This is already how I feel like I'm using the web, even though I'm not. Does that make sense?

This is how my interaction with the Internet is abstracted in my mind, how the space is visualized in a way that facilitates my 'netsense', so to speak.

So, I guess this is awesome.

[whatnameisavailablee]

I'm more likely to die because of an accident? Feminists... I guess we're equal eh'.

[StrikerTheLizard]

It doesn't help that Pivot is also a capable animation program.

[Lycanthis]

no linux support ==> no deal

[nathanaelawrence]

@Lycanthis

1. Deep Zoom Items = documented format

2. Deep Zoom Collections = documented format

3. XML = easily parsed schema

4. Linux = resourceful users

5. You can build your own HTML5 Canvas or Flash viewer for Pivot collections.

6. Seadragon AJAX may beat you to #5

7. Novell's Moonlight team will get this running in 2011.

[itshelpa]

I like that part of the future :)

[mrpitchf0rk]

Hey, I like this.

[clearmenser]

Zzzz. Let me know when it's available for Mac or on the web.

No, sorry, there's no wisdom to be found in information, only information. Wisdom comes from experience and intelligence, failing and succeeding.

[mazdaplz]

there's one factor that will determine if this tool will find widespread use among the people... does it work with porn? :)

[flyhead2]

Very interesting application. I wonder if this is a commercialisation of NSA software.

[jasonlajoie]

This is exactly the type of evolutionary developement that makes web grow more useful. We are living in the information age with the invent of the internet and this is just the type of idea that makes the information flow more freely and flexibly. I thank the great minds behind Pivot:)

[Jaybeat2k6]

Expertly put, brother.

[86kinky86]

the problem with this is that these filters are preset and it limits the flexibility.

[anotherelvis]

It will probably only work with a single well-structured data set from a single site.

If they start gathering random data from the internet to create their graphs, then I will make a site claiming that the goatse man is a TED-price winner.

[GermanStraight1]

well ...

all of the ideas of Mr. Gates where GREAT when first annouced ...

just wonder what`s it like when they hit the street ???

Brgds

GSO

p.s. still , i like the idea !!!

[rafaravioli]

Looks like it wouldn't be very useful except for wasting time surfing the web.

[jido35]

@rafaravioli Exactly.

[falsafa]

I don't think they support Linux either....

[iamafractal]

Forget XP? great idea!

[noobrication]

Wow, a five minute advert followed by a shorter advert :/

[penutwi]

well this looks awesome

[midij]

sistemising data is always the best way to learn and understand it.

[Vinesere]

definitely enjoyed seeing his end show walk, so linear and one foot forward the other one!

[FlagCaptured]

Awesome. Love the idea of being able to zoom out to see a site page in its entirety. :D

[elspoko]

This is a sociologists wet dream.

[Tnias13]

Looks quite impressive, gonna check it out.

[Maxstate]

This is how minds and in a lesser sense, mind 'mapping' works. I like it.

[BeortheMad]

I like this, going to download it right away ; )

[Android369]

this can be indeed quite useful

[chieltjeuh]

Just downloaded it seems awsome

[andresico2]

there should b a mac version...

[anotherelvis]

There should be a django version with jquery :)

But it is nice to see something so nice and radically cool come out of microsoft for a change. You can download it at getpivot(dot)com

[trylonperisphere]

There should be a web version. Then almost every platform is covered.

[StaIIIone]

I want to use this :D

[MarkoKraguljac]

Right direction, we now just need Google to make something even better that is not tied to Windows Aero...

[nathanaelawrence]

@MarkoKraguljac The Silverlight 4 version isn't tied to Windows Aero.

And for my friends who unreasonably hate Silverlight, keep your eye on Seadragon AJAX as the HTML5 Canvas tag becomes supported across all browsers. I'm pretty sure we'll see Seadragon AJAX support Deep Zoom Collections, rather than only single Deep Zoom Images, which enables an HTML5 Pivot control.

[MarkoKraguljac]

@nathanaelawrence

Interesting. Thanks buddy for your effort and good will.

[silversobe]

o.O