Looks like Vedea isn’t Microsoft’s only foray into data visualization. The Washington Post has an article up about a new data visualization tool that relies on Internet Explorer rendering to parse disparate data across the internet, called “Pivot”.
Pivot is itself a standalone application, but it relies heavily on Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. The best way to understand the importance of Pivot is through a real-world example of how this technology would work. So let's say I wanted a visualization of all the Wikipedia links to TechCrunch, Pivot would essentially crawl all of Wikipedia and create a map of the Wikipedia pages that are connected to TechCrunch, such as Michael Arrington’s Wikipedia page.
Looks pretty impressive, but I don’t see anything too revolutionary yet. Matt at AnythingTheyCanDo has built a simple tool to retrieve your Facebook friends, allowing you to analyze your friend data inside Pivot. I’ve embedded the demonstration of Pivot & his Facebook Tool after the break.
The software is currently in Private Beta, but TechCrunch & the Washington Post have 500 beta invites available to try out, Read the article for the details.
via An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft’s Newest Data Visualization Tool – washingtonpost.com.
