Today we’re exposing the complete revision history of all the edits made on CrunchBase, along with some cool ways of visualizing this historical data.

Revisions

Each CrunchBase entity page now has revisions — subpages where you can browse the edit history of a particular entity (say, Facebook’s edit history).  From the revisions page you can view revision pages which show what an entity page looked like at a historical point in time. For example, you can see what Facebook page looked like on March 19th, 2008 when it had its fifth edit. You can also step through the revision pages like a book, seeing how the page evolved over time.

Comparing Revisions

Something we’re particularly excited about are diff pages, which offer visual comparisons of two revisions of an entity. In obligatory red and green colors, diff pages highlight the sections that were present in the old version (red) and the ones that have been changed in the new (green).

You can find the diff pages from the revisions page by clicking on the date and time of an edit. Like revision pages, you can step through the diff pages to gain an historical appreciation of user edits. Also, comparison between any two arbitrary revisions in time is a snap (here’s the Facebook’s diff of revisions 5 and 74).

RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds! With an edit history, we figured we should generate a feed for entities so that users can receive notice when a page gets edited. If you go to an entity’s revisions page, you’ll see a Subscribe via RSS link in the top right-hand corner (see image, left). Currently, the feed items include the time, user, and a link to the diff page (”see what’s changed”), but we hope to make them more useful in the future. If you want to keep close tabs on your company’s (or your own) page, this is definitely the easiest way to do so.