seedz:

@fiatluxemburg

luckyorgood:

I think likely.

I just sat through a one hour webinar/conference call/press conference demonstration by Stephen Wolfram and was captivated for most of it.

I’m no webspert… the claims that this will threaten Google, seem silly, because it does a completely different thing… but the possibilities for integration with other sources of information or media — educational, commercial and corporate — basically anything on the interwebs — seem kind of limitless…

Fool me once …

The remarkable thing about Google is that it leverages a kind of stuctured data that emerges purely organically—links written into web based content by just about anyone—in order to return useful information. The trick there is that it’s a tautology. PageRank is effective because the result you want from Google is the thing in the category of concepts you throw at it that the most people link to (this is admittedly a bit of an oversimplicifaction). Now it’s an even better tautoloy because the result you want from Google is often whatever result you would get from Google (at the very least won’t people always go to Google to Google themselves?).

So that worked out ok. I think it’s because of a) how simple the unit of information “x linked to y” is, especially considering how useful it is, and b) total and complete standardization: every link on the public Web is built the same way.

All of the noble attempts to organize all of the information out there in a way that makes sense given how we want to process it have the great disadvantage of needing to impose (or discover) order where as Google’s service is providing a particular window onto the chaotic system.

Wolfram Alpha still needs a structured base of information to work on. The question is how to get it. Wolfram Alpha is taking a step away from the previously popular notion, embodied best by Twine, that you can trick people into doing it for you. That hasn’t worked for anyone except Google and only then because what they get people to provide is the very essence of the Web. We couldn’t have any of these wonderful exchanges without the magic of hypertext.

All that said, Wolfram Alpha does claim to be something categorically different than anything that has come before. If it turns out that it really works as an “inference engine” that can operate on a wide range of types of information then it could be something quite remarkable. The demos I’ve read about have certainly sounded stunning, but I doubt he’d show off anything but the best examples of its functioning (Twine was quite impressive too when it was just the inventor using it on a projector).

Unfortunately I can’t continue to worry about this at the moment. In conclusion: No, it will not be a big deal because everything fails. Unless it doesn’t fail, in which case we’d have a third potential first stop for getting information (it would join Google and Wikipedia). That would be a big deal. Not as big as Twitter or anything, but still.

Also, it’s possible that I just don’t like it because he named it after himself.