Press Release: Stamen Design releases licensed tool for moderating, visualizing flow of realtime online interaction
Chirp, San Francisco April 14, 2010: Eddy, a tool for capturing and publishing data from social media sites and the first product produced by leading data visualization experts Stamen Design, was announced today at Twitter's Developer Conference, Chirp.
Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It offers three primary features: rapid collection and curation of what people are saying about an event, moderation of acceptable material, and speedy, reliable republishing of these conversational streams. Setup of the application is fast and easy, and made specifically for use by interactive media designers. Eddy makes data available in formats specifically designed for publishing on the web, allowing developers to quickly iterate design concepts with real world data and to launch without fuss.
The popularity of Twitter means that broadcast media events are now expected to include a dimension of social feedback and interactivity. “It's no longer sufficient to wait for the next morning at a water cooler to talk about American Idol or the Super Bowl”, said Michal Migurski, CTO of Stamen. “The ‘backchannel’ of chatter, jokes, and shared emotions deepens the resonance of major broadcasts, and Eddy makes that conversation easy for companies to share with the public and build social experiences around.”
Stamen Design has produced numerous richly interactive, graphical web-based interpretations of live, fast-moving events for clients ranging from MoveOn.org to Twitter, MTV, and NBC. All of these projects have accentuated the quality of the live event while leaving a persistent, linkable trace of its highlights, such as the countrywide impact of Sidney Crosby's winning overtime goal in the USA/Canada gold medal hockey game, and the shock of Kanye West's unexpected outburst at the 2009 Video Music Awards.
Now, Stamen Design has developed a licensing program that will allow use of Eddy (the name comes from a disturbance in the flow of fluid) for commercial projects outside their own design studio. “The MTV Hope for Haiti Telethon and NBC's Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver both used Eddy to drive their live online data visualizations.” says Eric Rodenbeck, CEO and Creative Director of Stamen. “It's battle tested and ready for companies who want to create live interactive web-based coverage of media events. Eddy is not another analytics engine—there are plenty of those out there already. It's designed to make public data visualization fast and easy, whether you want to hire Stamen to do it or not.”
“We used Eddy to power the Hope for Haiti Now Twitter visualization and found it to be simple, powerful and extremely flexible,” says Michael Scogin, VP, Wireless, MTV. “Eddy allowed us to easily wade through the sea of tweets to find the few that were contextually and editorially relevant and present those to users in a visually interesting way. We think curation is key and Eddy helped us make sense of the Twitter stream for ourselves and our users.”
Stamen CEO Eric Rodenbeck will be discussing Eddy and other live Twitter visualization projects with Twitter's Chloe Sladden and Robin Sloan on the Main Stage at Chirp, Thursday, April 15, 2010, at Session 3, 1:30pm: “Twitter, Media, and Kanye's Exploding Head.”