
Silk - Filter and Visualize Data in Seconds - instakill
http://www.silkapp.com/
======
nonrecursive
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.

~~~
keen
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.

~~~
nonrecursive
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.

------
skrebbel
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?

~~~
hammock
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?

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

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

~~~
joshuacc
They seem to be using YouTube's Player API via JavaScript.
[http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/getting_started.html#pla...](http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/getting_started.html#player_apis)

------
alabut
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.

------
msy
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.

