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.
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'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.
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.
* 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.