I had to watch the TEDTalk a few times before I got the gist of what Gary Flake was getting at with his Pivot demo. It wasn’t until I tried a few demos available on the Web that it started to sink in how interesting a tack on data this tool takes.

Some of the interactive demos of the PivotViewer provided me the needed hands-on opportunity to see for myself how it can make data come to life and show some very interesting trends.

Another intriguing use of Pivot is at tweetpivot.com. I tried the tool as it appears on the Web page, and it allowed me to see a number of different trends at a glance. Since I have a very small Twitter list, it was more fun to plug in the user names of more popular Twitterers than I. There’s a limit of 1,000 Twitter users in any Pivot graph. Tweetpivot makes a beta Twitter client available, which seems to have much more functionality as seen in the “Lap Around TweetPivot Twitter Client.”

The future for Silverlight (and Pivot and Tweetpivot.com) seems to be uncertain as mentioned in this blog post by Bob Muglia of Microsoft, who’s Live Labs team created Pivot.

I hope to see more of Pivot technology, or at least more of it’s capabilities in use on the Web. It’s a fun and illuminating way of playing with data.