[gfodor]

This is just another example of a Wolfram product that is great (almost magical) from an algorithmic/data point of view but misses the mark from a design and product point of view. As with most of his products they are clearly designed by (and for) engineer/scientist types.

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.

[aswanson]

This is hilarious and spot-on at once. After a few minutes of salivating over the data, I came to one thought: Whom amongst the normals I know would give the slightest fuck about this product? Plugged that query into W|A. Answer: Null set.

[tripzilch]

That was a really great post (upvoted too, but I wanted to say it).

Just curious, why'd you say to not call it "data"?

Because it sounds too cold/impersonal or something? One thing I could also see such a product work well for is awareness, so that people realize not just how much private data they actively put into FB (people are slowly realizing this), but additionally how much, much more information can be extracted that was not intentionally added, but inferred from it with clever algorithms (which is kind of like a side-channel attack, I always thought).

[gfodor]

Yeah the "data" thing is just a rule of thumb, users aren't usually interested in data in and of itself, but how they can use it.

Creating a tool that is an expose' of how you are having your privacy violated by Facebook is a noble idea but you run the risk of creating a site that is creepy and discomforting. You run the risk, basically, of people shooting the messenger. So, tread carefully :) For example, if you're going to go that route, make sure people can only see their own results, not other peoples' (and, most importantly, they realize this is the case), and that you provide overt and helpful information on how to lock down their privacy. (Nobody likes to feel helpless, especially immediately after realizing they've been exposed.)

To me a much more attractive proposition is to figure out what parts of the W|A project (or things you've done) are non-obvious but valuable applications of non-trivial data analysis of the Facebook graph that many people would enjoy. Building an experience like this would avoid the creepy "I'm just telling it like it is" factor as well as open up the possibility to sharing each others' results which takes the experience to another level.