Google have recently released a new labs product known as Fusion Tables. Google Fusion Tables allows users to merge data from numerous data sources, to deliver compelling easy to understand comprehensive visualisations of the merged data set.
The announcement for Google Fusion Tables notes that it is releasing the API for it, which integrates with a number of existing Google products such as Maps, App Engine, Base Data and the Visualisation APIs to allow for motion charts, timelines, maps with all the data running on Google’s infrastructure.
The Google Fusion Tables example video provided showcases an incredibly easy to use interface, which interleaves numerous existing data sources with custom data from the user on the fly. While that might be fine for static data sets, Google Fusion Tables also allows for dynamic data sets as well – where data can be synchronised into Fusion Tables in real time as the data is changing.
Recently Microsoft Live Labs released a similar product named Pivot, which provides similar functionality with a completely different user experience. The upfront effort for implementing Microsoft Pivot appears to much greater than Google Fusion Tables, as at least at this stage there doesn’t appear to be a way to simply upload, merge or link data together without providing that data through the Pivot architecture.
Watch this space, I suspect there are going to be some incredibly innovative uses for both products.
