Tasty Data Goodies

What's cooking in the Swivel kitchen?

Hey everyone,

We've been making a lot of changes around Swivel lately.  And we want to share what we're cooking up in the Swivel kitchen with all of you.

For the next release of Swivel Business, we're working on enhancing performance, improving Swivel's look and feel, and giving you more interactivity when it comes to your data.

We are also dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 in the next release. We want to take advantage of the latest technologies, so we can build a better, more interactive product for you. As the possibilities expand for web applications, IE6 stands in the way of giving you the ultimate experience.

Since Microsoft released IE7 in 2006, the number of people using IE6 has fallen to a small minority of Swivelers.  Only 22% of visitors to swivel.com use the browser.  On Swivel Business, that number is even lower (10%).  And we're not the only ones moving on from the old technology; actually we're kind of jumping on the bandwagon here. Companies such as Apple, 37 signals, and Salesforce dropped support for IE6 earlier this year.

In order to keep using Swivel, people with the IE6 browser should take the chance to upgrade. All of these browsers are free to download and use:
  Download Internet Explorer 7
  Download Mozilla Firefox
  Download Safari

One other note about the upcoming release: we've also de-prioritized a few small features in favor of building newer, better ones (stay tuned).  You will no longer be able to rearrange reports with a simple drag and drop, but we're working on a more powerful interaction. Also, if your data is hooked up to our API, it will need to be reconfigured to work with our new API.  No worries though. Based on your feedback, this one should be easier to use.

Check back soon. We can't wait to share the new features we've been working on with all of you.

Thank you for your continued support. We always appreciate your thoughts and .

Attn: developers

We're excited to let you know that we have launched Swivel Business's API.

Find out more on the Swivel.code blog.

Introducing the new Swivel

It has been 3 months since we opened up our invitation-only version of new Swivel. Since then, we have seen some very creative uses of the product. We have also gotten a lot of great feedback from our early adopters. Now, we feel it is high-time to cast the net a little wider so more people can have a chance to try it out.

One of our early adopters is the Duke Smart Home, which is a 6,000 square foot live-in research laboratory. Sponsored by Home Depot, the Smart Home has over 40 Siemens sensors collecting data. With Swivel, they are able to fulfill one of their main goals of understanding where efficiencies lie and where they might improve.

"We are getting all of our data streaming into Swivel so that we can monitor, as a team, the environmental impact of our operations in a user-friendly way."  -  Nick Sarnoff, Project Leader, Duke Smart Home Monitoring and Automation Team

Please come check it out for yourself at Swivel Business.

New Swivel Private Edition

Earlier today we quietly deployed a new product – Swivel Private Edition - that we are really excited about. So excited, in fact, that we are focusing about 99.7% of our energy on perfecting it to get it ready for prime time.

Currently, access is available by invitation-only. We need your help! If you work in a team that needs to share and collaborate on private continually updated data, we’d love to invite you to take part in this important phase. By doing so, you’ll actively influence our product and design going forward.

The product is ideal for monitoring your business. It gives users a broad overview across many different indicators they care about… sort of a bird’s-eye view of your business as a whole. It is also a useful tool for analyzing and explaining your data to determine the impact different events may have on your business operations.

If this product sounds interesting and you are willing to be our guinea pig in the coming weeks, please contact me (sara at swivel dot com) or fill out the request form.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

It's Been A While

It's been a long time since we've given Swivel an upgrade.  Overdue, in fact.  Tonight, Sunday January 28th that is, we are going to give Swivel a serious bit of maintenance.  And despite what our maintenance screen says, it's going to be more than a few minutes.  In fact, it might take us into early Monday morning.  We'll all be behind the scenes here working hard. 

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Swivel was back up at around 3:35 AM Pacific time. So, what's new?

Search

We reworked search in Swivel so that it now actually finds something close to what you're looking for. (Don't ask us what it was finding before.) It now diligently searches against all the text in data sets, graphs, and users.

Go ahead and try it yourself. If you notice that something you know is in Swivel isn't showing up in search, please drop us a note into the feedback box.

Digg It link

If you see a graph on Swivel that shows something you want to tell the whole world about, click on the  Digg It link next to it. What is Digg? Here's how they themselves put it:

Digg is a digital media democracy. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.

Learn more about how Digg works here. So if you see something worth telling others about, click on the Digg It icon and you'll be taken to Digg.com to submit your story. We'll fill in the title and the description but you'll want to look them over and probably change them. (We hear that stories with dull titles don't make it very far in Digg.) Then pick the category — and you're ready to release your story into the wild.

General Maintenance

There are a few other things we had to do under the hood at Swivel. We hope they will make Swivel run a bit smoother (but in case they don't we won't go into much detail about what they are so we don't look too silly later).

Enjoy!

Russians Я Us...Not Quite

Last week a fellow countryman pointed out in his blog that Swivel does not support Cyrillic characters (those are the funny characters like the backwards 'R' used in Russian). A change we attempted to deploy tonight was intended to fix that, but we hit a problem that brought Swivel to a crawl, so we had to roll back the changes. The backwards 'R' will have to wait a bit while we figure it all out. Stay tuned.

Fast is faster than slow

Slow sucks.  Fast is most awesome.

When we deployed a couple days ago, some extra slow came along for a joy ride and a slow joy ride reminds me of the caterpillar roller coaster for the li'l kids at Disney World.  And li'l kids don't like scatter plots.  So, we tweaked some DB indexes and cached some partials, and hopefully we're at least dizzy tea cup fun now.  Oh, and we fixed some bugs with the controls and other small things.

It's 3 am again.  I should stop browsing through everyone's data and go to bed.

New Data Goodies

We just unwrapped some new goodies.  At Swivel, we will create new features and fix issues about once a week.  We'll give you a heads-up here on our blog every time.  Here are the details for our first week of life:

• Scatter plots!
  • We weren't planning on these in week 1, but we saw so much interesting data being uploaded (like this) that would come to life in a scatter plot that we went for it.  Warning: some scatter plots have a funny problem with the y-axis label right now and we're working on fixing that now

• Swivel Robot is Alive
  • What is the Swivel robot?  This past week, you would  recognize him best with his head popping off.  He had a really rough start when we launched.  The robot is the guy who makes all the graphs for us at Swivel.  That way, all of us Swivelers can just click through them and tweak them how we like instead of building them all from scratch.  When the Swivel robot is working well, you'll see progress bars moving as you click on data.
• Improved Search
  • Search will now look for stuff in graphs, people and data sets.  Let us know if it seems better to you.
• Data Home Pages
  • New and improved data pages. More filling, better flavor. We added pictures of a clock, a tape measure and some geometrical shapes to help distinguish between different kinds of data -- metrics, categories, and date/time.  We'll blog more about how Swivel looks at your data in the future.
• Fixed sorting in graph list, so you when you sort by rating, it actually does what you expect.
• URLs are automatically linked in comments, and long URLs are shortened.
• Horizontal bar graphs look a touch better.

There will be more to come next week.  If you want to help guide us, please use the feedback box (we read through it as a team every morning) or send us an email.

Fixing us some bugs

So we've had a day or two to sift through our feedback, troll everyone's blogs, and even put up our own public-facing blog.  And just-just now, we pushed out some more code.  Features/Bugs fixed as of 5 minutes ago:

• Delete a data set you uploaded
• Sort graphs by "Most Discussed"
• Rename columns (What?  column 001 wasn't good enough?)
• and a few other upload blockers

We'll be continuing to make bug fixes every day and if they're big enough, we'll be sure to mention it here.  And the face-melting features, those will be mentioned here too.

Oh, I should've introduced myself.  I'm Visnu, one of the engineers here at Swivel.  I've personally been getting some questions about what technology stack we're running (Yay Rails), what kind of code-fu fuels graphing, etc.  Expect that sort of stuff to show up here too for the geeks that are interested.

Anyway, feel free to hit us up in the comments if there's a favorite feature or bug you can't wait for.  There's also our drop down feedback box that plenty of you guys have found (along with the one on the broken robot page [I heart robots]).  We read through all of that too, so keep it up.