this is totally gonna work…

I’ve spilled a lot of (virtual) ink in this blog, but almost none of it about what I do all day. That’s because I’ve been working at a startup in “stealth mode” for darn near two years and haven’t been able to really say much about it. Until today.

Today at Evri we’re launching the beta version of our site. If you head to the home page and signup, you’ll get yourself a free set of brand-new shiny credentials that will give you the keys to data-surfing heaven.

The company blog post does a good job of highlighting what we have available, but for the truly lazy I’ll give you the quick highlights.

First, is the home page which gives you a look at entities and their relations as we understand them currently. We start out with lists ranking the top people, places and things. In addition to popularity, you can also see who is rising and falling in popularity over time. All of these lists are clickable and enable our super-whizzy widget which provides a nice way of pivoting between entities, all the while getting related content.

This is one of my favorite parts of the product, as it’s really easy to just get lost wandering around from link to link to see how things are related. It’s like a big six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon game, except that you can do with just about anything. Part of that link-hopping experience is visiting specific pages about each entity.

Here you can find more detailed content about an entity. Currently these details comes from Wikipedia, but we anticipate adding several other specific sources of structured content. And of course, these pages link you to other pages, so between the hub-and-spoke visualization and the detail pages you can spend quite a bit of time just data-grazing.

So take it for a spin and have some fun exploring! Give us your feedback (a link is at the top of each page) and let us know what you like and don’t like. Most importantly, stay tuned. This is just the beginning for us, we have some pretty exciting stuff in the works and you won’t want to miss out.

Things have been a bit nutty the last few days–as they are for any release–but it will be worth it for the satisfaction of finally lighting this candle.

Enjoy!