“Le serveur à l’adresse www.swivel.com met trop de temps à répondre.”

Thanks to Robert Kosara for his post on eagereyes about Swivel – and it’s untimely demise. “The Rise and Fall of Swivel.com”

I left the following comment (my typos remain intact here):

“With any startup, there are ups and downs, small mistakes and big mistakes. I joined Swivel as VP & Chief Data Officer early on and was completely blown away by the talent and intelligence of the team and the vision of the founders – Brian Mulloy in particular. I think everyone involved truly had (and some still have, as I do) the strong belief that data and tools for understanding them are the next place for the web to have true impact.

I chalk a lot of the shortcomings of Swivel to timing, not lack of vision, interest by early-adopters, mass-market appeal or talent of the team. Web-based technologies needed to assemble complex interactions (but in a simple UI) for real-time data analysis are still maturing and people’s comfort level in sharing data on the web is still evolving as well (Particularly business or research data – this was before “in the cloud” was a phrase middle managers had ever heard of, and frankly are still afraid of. And last I checked, even tax-payer funded research data sets are pretty closely guarded).

I left Swivel to run Product at Flickr and am now overseeing Product strategy at PLoS, a non-profit dedicated to making more scientific and medical research open access with open data supporting it. Through Swivel I met an amazing community of like-minded folks (like the Robert, who runs this site) that, on a personal level, make Swivel a huge success for me. People with whom I hope to have healthy discussions into the distant future about the intersection of data, the web and the impact on society.”