Give us your cold, your tired, your…data?
Posted on April 10, 2008 by Chris DeBrusk
A few months back I was brainstorming Internet startup ideas in a bar in midtown, New York City (great bar by the way) and one of the ideas that we came up with was sort of a social network for data. The concept was a centralized database infrastructure where anyone who wanted could upload data sets that they had created to share, trade or sell. We never got far with the idea but at the time it sounded pretty cool - subject to the effects of three glasses of single malt of course.
Of course like all good ideas, there are many others out there who are thinking along the same lines. Bret Taylor, formerly of Google expressed the same desire in his blog and Read Write Web published a list of current sites that allow you to share data sets in some way.
I’ve played with a few of these sites and while they are interesting, the thing I keep coming back to is that they need to be much easier to use. I think the problem here is that most of the existing sites are built for techies by techies and as a result aren’t very user centric. It should be as easy for a university researcher with a huge, complicated data set to share it, as Joe Smith down the block who has a passion for coin collecting and has documented (with pictures) every US penny minted from 1850 to today and wants to share what he’s built.
The site that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is Geni.com. They have made a complicated data issue – geological research – really really easy. I put my direct family into the tool about six months ago on a whim and at last count my relatives have added 2000+ people to the tree with pictures, email addresses, birthdays and all sorts of data. If my aunt who can barely turn on her computer can do it then the tool has met the usability test. The other tool that comes to mind is FileMaker – creating data sets in it was brain dead simple.
What is necessary in this particular space is to make it really easy to model complex data elements. The startup that manages to do it will win and should be huge. If they also allow people to connect data sets together and pull them off to their blogs, websites, and so on then they will really win. Combine the business with either the Amazon or Google cloud computing databases and things get really interesting.
I hope someone solves this soon. I’ll be a user…I love data.
Sphere: Related Content» Filed Under Content Disaggregation, Social Networking, User Centric Design
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