Firstly, as someone with current access to Qwiki, many thanks for the ego boost at the start there! No one's called me special for a while. I feel warm.
Secondly, I enjoyed the article. So far I'm liking the concept of Qwiki more than the implementation, but it has plenty of time to morph in to something just as special as myself.
I'd like to see more options on the voices. I can see Satnav-style customisation goodness immediately!
Qwiki is an information delivery service that has some people really excited. Special people. But we wanted to know: just what kind of excited? Salacious? Serious? Stupid? The results are not as titillating as we hoped, but they might surprise those expecting a warm and fuzzy startup.
Tech media is buzzing about startup Qwiki, and alpha invites recently went out to a select few with high media status. Ideally, the service offers what can best be called a visual version of Wikipedia, sans edit wars, plus apps to integrate the service into daily life (such as waking you up with a weather report and your to-do list). Leave your email on their signup page, and if you’re important enough, they’ll let you in.
Really.
After The Chosen Ones (aka Mashable and TechCrunch) shared a mutual masturbation hypegasm over the service, we decided to slip into our nicest HazMat suits and wade into the mess to see for ourselves if it was all that.
Despite the hype, at first glance it’s not all that sexy. But it still sounds sexy. Doug Imbruce, the CEO of Qwiki, exclaimed, “Information is an experience we can watch.” Imbruce (and Louis Monier, who gave us the gift of AltaVista) gleaned inspiration from computer interfaces as seen in Sci-Fi movies. Which is great, because Sci-Fi is sexy, and much of the way we hope to see our Utopian futures is writ large in the realm of science fiction.
I got an invite, and spent the weekend looking for sex, music and San Francisco info on the service.
Leaving hype out of it, we opened our tech-and-sex addled minds up long enough to consider that Qwiki might be a mind-blowing experience in which startup culture stops making love to the mirror long enough to actually produce a really neat new way to learn things and get answers.
The answer — to what the hell is Qwiki and why should we care? — is somewhere in the middle.
Like many predecessors Qwiki wants to reinvent the wheel of information consumption: search for a topic and you get a short video, accompanying text, and audio presentation culled from multiple data sources. It’s like if Wikipedia had movie trailers as results when you search for topics (but hopefully without Wikipedia’s crippling editorial vandalism issues). Qwiki tells us they host nearly three million presentations on a wide range of encyclopedic topics.
Here, information delivery is a slicked-up product. And that’s great if you want information lite, avec entertainment. The word “wiki” means fast, and putting a “q” in front of it suggests something along the lines of light speed. But Qwiki isn’t the shortest route to finding answers, not by a long shot (especially if you want to fact-check the data). It is especially not great for anyone scanning for specifics (like the cast list of a film), or seeking info in any kind of fast or efficient way.
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