I used the new super-special search Engine Wolfram Alpha to seek out the term “dating”. I was not impressed, zero results. The founder’s book, A New Kind Of Science, at about 96,000 pages, props open my door nicely when it gets windy. Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good, know what I mean? Over time semantic web style searching for people may be the norm, right now it oscillates between scarily omniscient and broken.
Facebook Rolling Out Videochat. What does this mean for Speedate.com and Woome?
Went over and hung with Eons today. Got to meet Bostonian Jeff Taylor, the CEO. You may know Jeff as the founder of Monster, which bought Tickle back in the day.
Also talked to Datingsitebuilder. Trying to understand their value proposition and how they compare to White Label Dating and Wazzum.
Male pickup dudes, is Under 21 all it’s cracked up to be?
On-demand Help desk, Customer Support & Service SaaS from Zendesk.
I have been extremely busy, at least 20 1/2-done posts in the hopper. Hopefully I can knock some of the good stuff out this weekend.
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Wolfram Alpha is a joke at the moment. Nothing like a Google-killer. Still, who remembers Google as a debutante? Give it time. I’m sure they’ll refine the shit out of it once the queries start rolling in.
I agree with casualencounters. Wolfram Alpha actually does surprisingly well considering it just came out of the gate. It’s only going to get better. Much better I suspect.
Also, the type of query you put in (just one word) isn’t what it’s really designed to handle (at least not now). It’s designed to compute answers to questions. Instead of putting in just dating try asking what questions you want answered about dating. Also, remember that it has to have access to the necessary data. If you ask how many online daters are actually secretly married it has to have indexed a survey of some sort to get the answers. It can’t answer that now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did eventually. As it crawls more data and adds to its knowledge it’ll answer more questions.
Another one of its current goals is to be reliable as a reference. If something isn’t a hard fact they’re not bothering with it. Which, in my opinion, is the right way to go. Build up credibility that you indeed give correct answers for what you can understand to the point where you become basically indisputable and then use that gained trust when you expand what’s understood by the system to more hazy topics and less obviously correct sources.
You’re both right, I should have used a phrase instead of a single word.
I asked it why I’m still single and it came back with nothing which made me sad.
Seems like they should focus on various domain-specific queries?
Reminds me of Freebase, hopefully there will be an API for the data.
There’s already an API available:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html
I hear you, Guillaume Theoret, but you have to appreciate that WolframAlpha generated an enormous amount of buzz then totally failed to deliver in line with people’s trumped-up expectations. They would have been much better off starting with a whimper, rather than a bang, as Google did (though admittedly Google did it that way because they didn’t have much choice, in the beginning.)
Zendesk looks like a great service. Thanks for the heads up.
I particularly like the way they presented Zendesk on their home page with a video. Video is the best way to sell this service, short of being sold by an actual salesperson. When will dating sites start using video to explain their USP’s to end users?.
Their home page is nice though, very clear.
Dating site talking head videos are annoying and not very helpful for the most part. I did a survey of several last year and was not impressed. Blond hair and great legs don’t necessarily make for a great sales pitch.
Now the flash ads of the women the appear at the bottom of the screen on adult sites these days, *that* works wonders, those crt/signup rates must be incredibly high.
I’m off to work on my spam email competition entry.
I agree, with talking heads. Users need more. A quick tour. A quick demo of how the particular dating site is different. I like the zendesk overview. Its for a business audience obviously. But they got me fired up about zendesk, enough to want to take another look, and dig deeper.
test.
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