61–70 of 105 posts
Just... wow. I love what Wolfram Alpha is doing with data-based search results. So innovative and a natural search space that Google is only dipping their toes into.
Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else? Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach. Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.
Yup, it sucks. That happened to me with Light Table, though I had only been developing very rough prototypes rather than any kind of polished demo. On the positive side, there is a sense in which it is still overall a good thing. You might have had your thunder stolen, but at least more people are now looking up at the sky, and you've had the opportunity to think deeply about where the winds are blowing.
.. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (which is nice by the way).
> all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website. .. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (…
> all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website. .. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (…
This is the kind of thing they need to get into. Data that lots of people care about, data for the masses, rather than obscure details on bolt sizes or ancient currencies. "Compute things people want". I could only imagine what they could do with celebrity gossip. Or product comparisons.
I can see this extending to Twitter, Linked in and so on, combining everything into a dynamic scorecard. This is what Klout should have been.
(Personal blog post showing clustering: http://lancewiggs.com/2012/08/31/mapping-your-social-network...)
> all you have to do is type “facebook report” into the standard Wolfram|Alpha website. .. and connect with your Facebook account, grant extended permissions, signup for a Wolfram account, go to your mail inbox, validate your Wolfram ID, hit a dead end, sign into Wolfram with your Wolfram account, type "facebook report" in the searchbox again, wait 10 minutes for the page to load and finally.. get to see the report (…
Do you know that feeling when a project/idea you have been working on a long time gets implemented almost exactly as you imagined it, only by someone else? Well I do now. I'm not sure if I should be excited, or listen to the sick feeling in my stomach. Edit: Thanks for the positive support! I'll keep working on the project.
This is the first time they've done something with W|A that I could see taking off since it's narcissistic, interesting, and custom for each person who uses it. But, the signup workflow is horrible (it requires a magic incantation of "facebook report"), it's a non-actionable, giant information dump that gives me no reason to come back and nothing to do with it. The blog post linked in this is basically a giant manual. I couldn't even read the whole thing. If your product needs a manual, you are doing it wrong. (I didn't even get this far, I am going on screenshots since the sign up didn't even work.)
Mine their product for ideas, and then design one that doesn't suck and that people will rave about. They've done a lot of the heavy lifting of figuring out all the ways to slice the data, now pick out the best that people will care about and aren't meaningless nerd-trivia. You can execute a million times better than this. They are shackled by their thinking both from the fact they are scientists and engineers and they are using this as a way to funnel people into Wolfram|Alpha, which most normal people have no real use for.(They seem to think we live in a world where an average person, when discussing geopolitics over coffee, gets into an argument over the ratio of GDP between Chile and Ecuador, and needs to know STAT, and pulls up W|A for the answer. Except for those whose lives are like The Big Bang Theory, its a small market.)
Build a standalone product that's well designed, curates the data to the most important parts (and doesn't call it "data"), gives them a reason to keep coming back, and is viral and easy to share and sign up for and you will be light years ahead of this thing. Oh, and if it really has something special that people want, even just one thing, guess what, you can probably charge for it too.
As for Wolfram, if he could manage to hire some creative designers and product people, and could cede his ego to their ideas a bit, it's hard to understate how much insane shit they could be building over there.
Edit: For example, it's truly amazing to me that I can still get to a page like this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=akljdfalksjdf -- since there is a certain domain W|A can compute that is much, much smaller than the space of all queries, the user should not be able to press enter until they have a valid query. Ugh.