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.

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.

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).

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.

Yup, it sucks. That happened to me with Light Table, though I had only been developing very rough prototypes rather than any kind of polished demo.

On the positive side, there is a sense in which it is still overall a good thing. You might have had your thunder stolen, but at least more people are now looking up at the sky, and you've had the opportunity to think deeply about where the winds are blowing.

Thanks, I definitely feel that way too, plus they totally missed some things here which are pretty important to me like privacy, more friend analysis, openness as a platform and predictive models.

I definitely wouldn't stop on a Light Table like thing if you have made much progress. While I am very excited and optimistic about Light Table, there are a lot of choices to make. Especially as they are somehow going to try to monetize it, I think there is definitely room for competitors.

Don't give up. There is a ton of room in the IDE space, and Light Table isn't going to get it all right.

If you create a tool that saves devs 1 hour a week, you're saving a 10 man shop 25k/year.

Why not work on Light Table? http://kodowa.com/jobs

Write an Eclipse or Vim plugin instead, and have a greater impact.

I'd like to, but I suspect this kind of thing: http://imgur.com/ZIVd4 is best done in an HTML-based IDE like Light Table where you can take advantage of SVG.

This happened to me when Yobongo was announced.

I had been working on basically the exact same concept for several months. Mine was named GeoHello. I was building mine as a web app, meant to be used by mobile devices. I felt that a native app would be better, but I didn't have any iOS experience at that point in time, so I went with web. I had the demo finished and even began trying to get people to try it out. In general, everybody thought it was neat. Then, a few days later, word of Yobongo started to show up on TechCrunch as a project that was being started by a team with somebody that was well known in the Valley. They were also building it as a native iOS app.

I was pretty depressed for a little while, but it actually played to my advantage because I got to see how Yobongo tackled many of the chicken and egg problems that a real time location based app faces. There were a few other apps that appeared shortly after Yobongo that were doing the same thing. I'm pretty sure that none of them are around anymore because that's a pretty difficult problem to overcome.

Yeah, I bet that's a difficult problem. It would be pretty cool to see how WA implemented this, unfortunately they don't say. I did get a good perspective of how useful this kinda of service is and how much people are interested in it, whereas before I doubted it would be useful beyond my own curiosity.

Disrupt it :) Now you know what features they've got (and more importantly, what features they don't). I personally don't feel 100% comfortable linking with facebook - so a little pre-scan pep talk would be great. Plenty of other metrics to check out, too. Don't give up.

I agree. As exciting as this looks, I really don't want to give away every permission to WA. Who knowns what there going to do with it. I would like this kind of analysis to be local, thanks for the support!

Totally agree with this. Competition is good - plus you have the advantage of seeing what they worked on. Remember, first mover advantage might be good in some cases - but in a lot of cases the only thing Pioneers get is arrows in the back.

Had this happen with my Master's thesis. Not fun. The positive side is, it was a good idea (at least based on the attention it's getting). It gave me something to compare to as well.

Yeah, it's good to know that you are at least keeping up with the exciting ideas. Better than being completely surprised by it. It's also nice to get some perspective on how other people think about the topic.

Better than creating something that nobody wants or cares about certainly :)

Also, don't let this stop you. If you really feel like giving up though, consider open sourcing it, I suspect some people (myself included) are interested in this, but hesitant to give our info away to some untrusted 3rd party.

I'm not giving up. There are a few things they totally missed here like the fact I have to give away all my data and that it's not platform based (I can't build on it). I would like to be able to ad-hoc query and visualize my social data on my own terms locally. Not much written yet, but I will probably be open source.

Best of luck :)

Yeah - also take some comfort in the fact that though this sounds amazing (and probably is), it's clearly illustrating the fact that it's easier to have an idea, get it kind of working, and make a big announcement about it than it is to oversee a successful launch.

I don't know what's causing the failures (whether it's a problem at wolfram's end or facebook) but I've seen multiple errors every time I've tried this and judging from the comments here in hn, many others are, too. Maybe you'll be first to announce a reliably working implementation?

Sorry, but don't despair! Facebook did the same to a project/idea I started because they didn't. I thought about giving up, but they didn't implement it exactly as my site. I should be glad they made it because it was something I wanted and they could make it faster. If Wolfram Alpha didn't implement what I wanted with this, I hope yours does.

Thanks! There are definitely some features missing here that I would love to see. I'll keep working on it!

I think I would be on the side of excited.

It would be nice to make a batrillion dollars I suppose, but I already have a day job and a growing list of books that I haven't read, and as much as I like coding in the case of my main idea I'm kicking around it's a means to an end, and I would be a happy chap if that end already existed.

I am totally excited (it's a mixed feeling), but this doesn't exactly fulfil my end goal for the project: let me fiddle with my own facebook data.

It's pretty good inspiration though.

Totally :-) You get to see what works and what doesn't

I know how you feel. We have something like this in an upcoming product we're launching.

But that's fine. It's okay for people to compete with you. However if you want to chat with someone else working on similar stuff pre-launch, always love to talk to people working on stuff we're working on - tends to make us all better.

Yeah, even though they are your "competition" they have to most in common with you in terms of interests.

...also people often complement by going after slightly different things which creates an ecosystem all benefit from. Ours is a platform play with this as a simple use case to onboard people, so this isn't the core focus. We'll probably still do it, as implementation is partly done already, but it's good to see others doing similar.

Happened to me when Apple launched the iPhone, which I had designed for my pre-GCSE project in 1996.

Then again when for my actual GCSE project, I designed a electric car in a Lotus Elise inspired body.

That's life though, suffice to say I'm buying a tesla roadster when they're next available and I have the cash.

Think of this way. Some one build the prototype for you. Now go ask everyone showing this and find out if they will pay for this?

The answers will give you an idea how useful this is and whether to pursue it or not.

I'm sure there are ways you could improve upon this.

I'm sure. I would like it to be more of an open platform for Facebook data, and focus more on friends. Plus it should be local instead of trusting other with all your data.