Could Pivot be a new cure for information overload?

After watching a TED talk by Gary Flake about Microsoft Live Labs’ Pivot I felt compelled to download it and test it out.

 

Pivot is a new tool (currently only available to PC users) which aims to make it easier to deal with information overload by doing something that, according to Gary Flake, is “not quite browsing and not quite searching”. Pivot puts information into collections combining images and text. These collections can be arranged, sorted and filtered in many different ways, allowing users to see how information is linked. Users can also zoom in and out, choosing to see all the information at once, or only a portion of it.

 

   

From many images to just a few, Pivot can help you sort through huge amounts of information.
 

The nice thing about Pivot is that it is very visual. The images are very high quality and load really quickly. This means zooming in and out and rearranging happens fast and doesn’t involve the frustrating task of waiting for images to load.

Currently, there are sample collections on Pivot (my favourite being the dog breed collection) but the aim is for users to develop their own collections. To do this anyone (or anyone with Office 2007) can download an Excel add on and fill in a spreadsheet with all the information for their collection.

Could Pivot be the future of searching? Maybe one day instead of just typing “small obedient dog” into Google and reading through the results, the Pivot dog breed collection will be used, allowing users to see all the small, obedient dogs. Test it out and see what you think.