Thanks! I changed the link.

And yes, I agree Re the expectations management issue. I suspect that the initial teaser was intended to both test the way reactions might initially form themselves and also to attract the attention of interested parties and “movers and shakers” to seed business development.

I also agree that the natural language interface is only one part of the larger technology–and perhaps the smaller portion of what is valuable. There are are clearly multiple layers of value propositions.

The way most people will see this is through the natural language box on the W|A site. And there is an expectation management issue there as well: to use the abbreviated grammar of asking for information on one thing or relationships between several entities (mortgage information for example, or chemical reactions, or ….) .

People will certainly test it with all sorts of absurd inputs to see what works and what doesn’t. And this is the child scientist in all of us that tries to test things by banging on them. But I think that folks will settle down into the site’s grammar–just as they do with Google. So, eventually it will come down (for the general public) whether it fills in a need–perhaps as yet unperceived–or perhaps creates a new landscape.

–David

But I also think the primacy of their natural language interface will undermine their true value proposition. I’m not sure they agree with me on that point, and we’ll see how it plays out.

By the way, you might want to link here from your blog, rather than to the syndicated post on Smart Data Collective.

http://www.alpha-tips.com/alphatips/blog

Thanks!

–David (the blog’s author…)

http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-i-was-positively-impressed-wolfram-alpha.html

According to Wikipedia, “Doug Lenat estimated the effort to complete Cyc would be 250,000 rules and 350 man-years of effort”. Freebase has been crowd-sourced, which makes it harder to know how much effort has gone into it, or how much more effort would be needed to harmonize it into a representation standardized enough to imagine computing over it.

In contrast, Wolfram Alpha seems to have been assembled from existing structured content repositories, over about 2 years (and surely with far fewer than 175 people).

Let me be clear: I’ve moved from deeply skeptical to cautiously optimistic. That’s a huge shift for me–I don’t usually like eating my words. But I still want to bang hard on it before declaring it a success. I’m on the list for early access. If you think you can convince Wolfram Alpha that they’d want you on that list, let me know, and I’ll happily introduce you to my contact there.

What I’m suggesting is that they shouldn’t be optimizing for human end-users, but rather for programmatic use by other applications. Think Excel rather than Google.