Muckety.com
30/44 points
Pros: Free, good variety of data segments
Cons: Depth of data, lack of original source references, hard to navigate interface when too many entities displayed.
The Bottom Line: With improvements to their interface in Summer 2009, Muckety has become much more useful but their data sources are still limited compared to other solutions.
Summary:
Muckety is published by Muckety LLC, a company founded in 2006 by a team with years of experience in journalism, technology and online publishing. The name Muckety derives, of course, from muckety mucks. Some follow the money. [They] follow the muckety, producing a daily news and information site based on online databases (which [they] enlarge daily), extensive research and old-fashioned journalism.
While it seems that their primary data sources comes from news articles – not a surprise when you visit their website and find that 80% of their home page is made up of the latest news headlines - they have also integrated other data sources which is a plus. The pros of this approach are that you may find some interesting supplemental information on more well-known prospects (did you know that Scott Adams of Dilbert is a member of MENSA, graduated from Hartwick College and is the past CEO of Scott Adams’ Foods, Inc.?) but for those prospects who are wealthy and connected without appearing in the news, I have run test where their names do not appear here but do on other sites. Using my own last name, I found 56 entities mapped on MarketVisual compared to 5 on Muckety.
Not only is their data limited but the depth is not great either (you can't drill down to original source material, you can't tell how long a certain entity has been connected to another - vital in our profession). The maps themselves are sometimes problematic. Iin some of them you can't continue to expand certain maps without loosing your starting point (there are entities that are simply labeled "29 trustees" and then, when you click on them, the original person/entitiy is lost) and when you don't loose your starting point, the icons for the entities are too big to have more than 30 or 40 entities without getting lost. Add to that the fact that you can't zoom in our out, export to Excel, or e-mail maps and the site looses more ground for presentations. Additionally,one has no capacity to find and map connections between multiple entities (how do I get from Bill Gates to Warren Buffet?) which is probably the number one reason why anyone in our field would use relationship mapping.
However, despite its lack of depth, Muckety certainly has breadth! You'll find data on Awards, Books, Business, Colleges, Comedy acts, Comic strips, Court proceedings, Courts, Elections, Fictional characters, Films, Fraternal organizations, Governments, Indian tribes, Labor organizations, Media organizations, Musical groups, Nonprofits, Pension funds, People, Political campaigns, Political conventions, Political organizations, Radio shows, Religious organizations, Research organizations, Schools, Sports events, Sports teams, Theater productions, Theater troupes and Trade groups.
Another advantage concerns prospects who you suspect may be embroiled in controversy. If the scandal is big enough, you can likely find something on Muckety.com and provide some much needed information to your staff. But if you try to find someone further outside of the public’s eye, you’re likely to be disappointed. For a fee (undisclosed to me), Muckety offers on-site integration of your data. I have heard anecdotally that one person was quoted a price of $10,000.
Also, their greatly improved interface has solved all the problems of the previous interface (poor ability to manipulate entities, no features for picking the connections you wish to expand) and offers a nice feature whereby you can do full-screen maps to better navigate the data and can also eliminate all connections that are dead ends (only one connection).
Overall, for non-research professions and those simply curious about mapping technology it is a great introduction to the technology and some of its potential, but for on-the-ground use in reasearch, it's not the best solution out there.