I Want My Live Embedded Data!

Chris Anderson writes:

The Long Tail: Google Apps and the power of embedded functionality: There been a lot of talk today about Google releasing a suite of hosted applications.... As Anil Dash discusses here, these web-based apps are not meant to replace Office but to compliment it by doing things online that desktop software just can't do well. What might those things be? I think we have a hint in the spread of embedded video, courtesy of YouTube. The ability to easily embed into any blog page a full-featured videoplayer dedicated to a single video is a large part of YouTube's success. It doesn't require you to go elsewhere or download anything--it just works.

Now imagine the same model working for data. Rather than me posting static jpeg charts and links to Excel spreadsheet files, what if I could post data the way I post videos: as an embedded mini-app that simply displays the data in a useful way, allowing readers to manipulate or copy it at will?... That's what I want. Not an online spreadsheet that simply replicates what Excel already does perfectly well on my laptop, but small spreadsheet elements that I can paste... in the form of a specific data set or graph. The fact that they're hosted elsewhere is what would make them simple enough to use, just as embedding YouTube video is so head-slapping easy today....

The embedded functionality era has just begun. YouTube is just the start of something much bigger.

Indeed. I had thought by now that I would be able to simply embed the spreadsheet at http://delong.typepad.com/print/20060829_Solow_growth.xls in my online lecture notes, so that people could easily see and then do their own Solow growth model calculations. But it hasn't happened--although I strongly suspect Google or Microsoft will make it possible by this time next year.

YouTube is not the only example of this working now. Consider gapminder: http://tools.google.com/gapminder/

Comments

[tom s.]

Not sure if this is what you meen, but Zohosheet lets you publish (simple) graphs based on data held in a server-hosted spreadsheet (a la Google Spreadsheets), in such a way that the graph is updated within the web page that contains it. The graph is made available as a graphic (png format).

See the lower graph at http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2006/08/entrails_and_te.html
for an example.

[tom s.]

Wow. I had not seen gapminder before. It is quite something (although the link just goes to tools.google.com, and it should go to tools.google.com/gapminder.

[tom s.]

Now I've looked at gapminder I see what you are looking for, and Zohosheet -- while a useful application -- isn't (yet) up to what you want, as it just displays a fixed graphic. Feel free to delete my comments if it would help...

[Trend Watcher]

Brad. Chris Anderson is right on target. This is what we dreaming about.

"Now imagine the same model working for data. Rather than me posting static jpeg charts and links to Excel spreadsheet files, what if I could post data the way I post videos: as an embedded mini-app that simply displays the data in a useful way, allowing readers to manipulate or copy it at will?... That's what I want. ... small spreadsheet elements that I can paste... in the form of a specific data set or graph. The fact that they're hosted elsewhere is what would make them simple enough to use, just as embedding YouTube video is so head-slapping easy today...."

My dream for this would have it be standard practice for the charts we post in a blog (for example some trend we think is interesting) to Click Through Back to the data and not only the data that we are showing in the chart, but the data set we were working with when we were analysing and deciding which picture to post. That way the reader could adjust the time periods, perhaps change a raw data metric view to a Year over Year percentage view, add a new metric to contrast with the one posted, maybe add in some new trend data to extend the data set and then post some new views of any new findings which would themselves be clickable back to the whole (possibly extended) data set. The possibilities for colaboration and increasing explanatory power would take a great leap forward once this is ready.

Hope you are right, Brad, that these capabilitites may be less than a year away.

[derrida derider]

Once again, Microsoft is way, way behind the game. They should have had embeddable mini-versions of Excel for just this several releases ago. But then their treatment of Excel (and Office generally) has been uniformly dismal since about 1996.

It's hard to remember now, but Office once won its market dominance partly on merit.

[Jon Fernquest]

Spreadsheets transformable WYSIWYG in real time, seamlessly into table, graph, pie chart...for immediate display and choice!

Right now, for instance, I have to convert Excel into CSV then CSV into Wikitables. People aren't using Wikitables that much because of this extra step. Writing data out in paragraph form when it's 10X easier to understand in table or graph form should be acknowledged as a failing in writing style.

Then there's the icing on the cake, analysis of the data with open source tools, exploratory data analysis, data mining (e.g. clustering) with Weka open source tools:
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/book.html

Also I really don't understand why we don't have good interactive open source learning tools to manipulate micro and macro graphs the way we do in the classroom. Programming languages and their libraries simply don't let us transform an idea into its software realization seamlessly yet. Scripting languages like Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails where big steps in this direction, but the big advances have yet to be made.

[Thomas Themel]

The interesting thing is that, technically speaking, Microsoft had all this stuff ready five years ago with Internet Explorer and ActiveX. The only real difference there is that they considered it a tool for user lock-in and steadfastly refused to make it open to non-Windows platforms.

I wonder why it didn't take off back then and make Microsoft win the Internet once and for all - simply ahead of its time because people didn't get the idea of doing stuff on the web? Refusal by the hepcats to use it because of Microsoft's evilness? The heap of security issues?

[James Wimberley]

The graph of Oceania's victories over Eurasia will be seamlessly corrected in real time! Scripta manent - ligata volant.

[jerry]

XLML - The Spreadsheet Markup Language

[Gary Farber]

Chris Anderson: "...these web-based apps are not meant to replace Office but to compliment it by doing things online that desktop software just can't do well."

And presumably Office flutters and blushes at the flattery.

Argh. I'm seeing this subliterate error on a daily basis from serious journalists nowadays. Why, lord, why? (I blame spellcheckers, and the people who use them.) (Not to say that we don't all make typos, of course, since we all do.)

[Oskar Shapley]

"I Want My Live Embedded Data! I had thought by now that I would be able to (...) although I strongly suspect Google or Microsoft will make it possible by this time next year."

I sense a demand attitude here.

Aren't you treating Google as the Big Benevolent Government that has the duty to supply you with goods for free?

Apparently the dot.com era with its free gifts has spoiled everyone...