Is it any surprise the similarity between a business focused on making money by watching money and any random business focused on making money by watching, I don’t know, tweets? The money watchers invest a lot of time & energy in building real time systems for delivering answers. The tweet watchers don’t care so much about real time currently. They’re ok with answers eventually rather than now. How much longer will this remain the case? Is there a future where real money is riding on immediate answers derived from tweets? Or from any random unit of “social media” from the fire hose? Regardless, it looks like the world of finance has a lot of the answers and WK’s High Frequency Trading Blog is a great behind the scenes look at how it could come together.

Wrangler Demo Video from Stanford Visualization Group on Vimeo.

“Too much time is spent manipulating data just to get analysis and visualization tools to read it. Wrangler is designed to accelerate this process: spend less time fighting with your data and more time learning from it. Wrangler allows interactive transformation of messy, real-world data into the data tables analysis tools expect. Export data for use in Excel, R, Tableau, Protovis, …”

Seeing how this is from Stanford University, there’s a nice paper as well, “Wrangler: Interactive Visual Specification of Data Transformation Scripts”. There’s a bit of an overlap between FreeBase’s Gridworks (now Google’s Refine tool) but really, more differences than similarity. But they both work in your browser–try Wrangler right now.