BigData - Exploration and Visualization

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EMC just announced Chorus - the social side of their BigData strategy.  From the GigaOm article about this
Greenplum, the analytics division of EMC, has announced new software that lets data analysts explore all their organization’s data and share interesting findings and data sets Facebook-style among their colleagues. The product is called Chorus, and it wraps around EMC’s Greenplum Database and Hadoop distribution, making all that data available for the data team work with.
I have no doubt this works remarkably well, has a coffee-maker attachment, and is the awesome-est EMC product ever.  I also have no doubt that EMC is going to make a ton of money (ok, some money) selling this to The Powers That Be In Large Organizations.

Why the snark on my part?
Well, its just that most of this is still fairly new.  As I've mentioned before, the gating factor in a lot of this is Visualization, and the ability to rapidly manipulate the data in new, unexpected, and serendipitous ways. Which is something that has existed for ever (SAS, SPSS, etc.) but the really interesting and usable stuff is being invented, on the fly, by people who really should know better.
Ok, thats a bit of a joke.  The point is that historically, the visualization and analytics were done by Smart People for Smart People, who all learnt The Way Things Are Done.

The new generation of people are no less smart, but come from different backgrounds, and are not afraid to say "Thats too complicated.  I just want to be able to make things work like Tom Cruise in Minority Report".  Hence, pinch-zoom, swipe, and a host of equally wildly inventive UI tweaks that we take absolutely for granted at this point.

The BigData / Analytics / Visualization boundaries are expanding at warp speed right now.  Any 'hard' product that gets released, with the associated lines in the sand, methodologies, etc., risks being obsolete at just about the same warp speed.

Buyer Beware...

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