BuzzData: A social network designed for data (beta coming soon) | Hacker News Reader

BuzzData: A social network designed for data (beta coming soon)

buzzdata.com

52 pointsMomoko1122 comments

I'm glad to see something coming in this space. I had been very sad to see DabbleDB go away, and Google Fusion Tables, Google Refine, and Google Docs Spreadsheets seem promising yet somewhat neglected, unfocused, and disjoint.

Surely, though, there must be a more descriptive term for this than a "social network"? Even though you could consider it (to some degree) to be a social network, Github doesn't describe itself as one.

Dude.

Help us find better words. We hate it at least as much as you do. If someone told me two years ago that I'd be passionately building a social network in 2011, I'd have laughed in their face.

That said, it's inarguable that you all knew what we were talking about, even if you groaned. That's what we're up against.

All I can ask is that you suspend your judgement and assume that this is the effort of people with a clue. We're motivated to be loved, not hated.

If I were going to describe this to a friend, I'd probably say "like flickr, but for data"... not something you can put in marketing materials, I know.

I'd like to abuse this reply to ask that when you add tools for geodata, that you please please please do what you can to help people produce visualizations and rankings that are not horribly skewed by poor choices of geographic boundaries.

I know this is a hard problem, but for people who don't do this all the time, it's really easy to end up with a headline like "Manhattan Leads the City in Pedestrian Deaths Per Square Mile, Study Finds" (Manhattan is, of course, the densest borough in New York City, so this probably isn't terribly useful information). I've seen maps that might show, for example, the areas of the US with the highest number of coffee shops per square mile, but the map is done based on counties, so here in Seattle we end up not looking terribly dense since over half of gigantic King County is mountainous and unpopulated.

I can do two better:

1. Give us good feedback on the things you care about, and we'll listen. We're a small team and we're listening to everything people tell us.

2. We're specifically not providing tools that create visualizations. There's a hundred startups and software products that already do this. BuzzData is where you put your visualizations and articles and apps when you're done.

(Yes, another reply to one of my own comments.)

After looking at your blog, I see that my example above was basically the geodata version of http://blog.buzzdata.com/post/7535032009/25-great-links-for-... . I think I'm in love.

How about just calling yourself a community ("We are a community passionate about liberating and sharing useful data on the web.")? Everyone understand what it means, it has a familiar touch to it and very few would oppose it as being to web2-y.

Try collaborative. "Social network" is such an annoying word.

We don't disagree. However, we've found that hub, community, collaboration are all words that make non-geek eyes zone out.

One of our high-level mandates is to demystify the discussion and use of data so that non-technical people are able to contribute in a meaningful way.

That means no acronyms, no "push requests" and going for familiar idioms.

Again, suspend judgement until you see it!

(I'm presupposing, of course, that "social network" sounds as overused of a term to everyone else as it does to me.)

Interesting project. What type of data are we talking about? Would you host leaked data a la Wikileaks?

Out of the gate, we're dealing with tabular datasets — think CSV, TSV, Excel and soon Stata/SPSS.

In the Fall, we'll be adding support for map shape data and structured/node in the form of JSON/XML.

Politically, we're trying our best to be a neutral common carrier in the same way that Vimeo, Flickr and Scribd are.

We're progressive individuals so we'll try to stay on the side of fighting the good fight. <- not approved by legal :)

I read your blog and discovered ScraperWiki through it (thanks!) so it makes a lot of sense that you're primarily focusing on structured and re-usable data.

Would love to see some big picture blog post on the web data gathering and transformation eco system, e.g. how all the different tools/services - scrapers, rss, FreeBase, Yahoo Pipes, InfoChimps, etc - can be used in real business cases. Right now there seems to be a rich rhizome growing but the big picture issues are hidden beneath the soil.

You're speaking to where we want to see all of this go.

There's no easy answers, but you might want to check out:

http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/23/flightcaster-flight-delay/

http://eaves.ca/2011/03/07/launching-an-open-data-business-r...

http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/7/2/research-driven-s...

I have also ordered Sarah Lacy's new book, about info entrepreneurs in the developing world:

http://www.amazon.ca/Brilliant-Crazy-Cocky-Entrepreneurs-Pro...

What about RDF / SPARQL?

Nope!

I've seen Pete speak about BuzzData and his vision in general -- I can't wait to see this launch!

Just an aside, but you specifically explain the proper spelling of your name as "BuzzData", but your logo uses a lowercase "d" while still using an uppercase "B", i.e. "Buzzdata" instead of "BuzzData". Not important, just thought I'd point out the discrepancy.

It's actually a conscious decision made by our branding team, and there's a blog post explaining our process coming in the future.

Death, taxes and branding. Sigh.

So what do you do guys?

Lots of stuff! More than I have time to type into this textarea.

I can say what we're not, however. BuzzData is NOT "a web-service for creating live embeddable charts with comments" so don't tase me, bro. :)

That's nice, will sleep better ;) Seriously, what's your 1-paragraph pitch? Too many general words on your web site.

If you know how to fix that problem, then you're in the wrong business.

Also, if you want to level that criticism, I suggest you spend a few minutes trying to understand what Vertica.com is offering. :)

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