Silk - Filter and Visualize Data in Seconds | Hacker News Reader

Silk - Filter and Visualize Data in Seconds

silkapp.com

29 pointsinstakill12 comments

I was very excited by the link title and disappointed by the site. Here were my reactions, roughly in order:

* Why would they show a hobo on the home page? (I'm not trying to be funny here, that is honestly what popped into my head.)

* I'm at the office, therefore I'm not going to play that video.

* Sign up for an invite? No thanks. I wish you had told me in text and images what silk is.

* I should go back to HN and write about how incredibly disappointed I am to not get any useful info from the home page. Data visualization is near and dear to my heart, and I would have liked very much to see a new app for that domain.

We had almost completely opposite reactions to the same landing page.

* I enjoyed all three videos. I thought they were informative and even funny at times. I didn't think the narrator was a hobo.

* I'm at the office, and I didn't mind watching the videos.

* Sign up for an invite? Honestly, I didn't either, but not because they had videos instead of text.

The service does look neat though.

I didn't even know there were multiple videos until you said something. I wasn't expecting a built in playlist, and the website design is so minimal that I bet people will skip over the other videos just out of not knowing they were there.

I'd be interested in seeing the view stats for each video in a couple weeks to see how this approach has worked for them. I imagine though that there will be considerable dropoff for video 2 and even lower on 3.

I don't think most people would associate casual clothes and long hair with hobo. I understand that's your reaction, but it doesn't seem fair.

I'm not trying to imply that it's a socially/morally correct reaction. I just wanted to write candidly in case it's helpful to the folks who made the site.

Cool stuff! If it works as advertized, it's basically wget plus a lot of perl/bash hacking, but then for non-programmers. I think it solves a very real problem. Basically voids a whole bunch of the infamous REBOL oneliners (http://www.rebol.com/oneliners.html).

I guess data export options would be very important.

I wonder to who they want to market this. I think the target audience willing to pay for it is very much used to working with installed enterprise software only (MS Office plus some CRM/ERP that they hate), and might be reluctant to switch over to a web application. Freemium model?

I have a friend at a place that would pay $X0,000s for it assuming it worked well. This friend's business has a roster of scores of these types of research tools and resources, many of them web-based.

Care to share your login so I can check it out?

Bad illustration in the video, Sarkozy has never been Prime Minister of France (he is the President of the Republic, which is quite different).

Anyone know how they managed to make an youtube video look so... seamless without the usual youtube chrome?

They seem to be using YouTube's Player API via JavaScript. http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/getting_started.html#pla...

I like it the same way that I liked the promise of Powerset when I first heard of it. I'm not sure how often I look for information that structured though and whether google doesn't still solve those queries.

So it's a metadata visualisation tool. Interesting but in no way groundbreaking. The problem isn't visualising metadata, that's easy. The problem is automating the creation of metadata.

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