Qwiki won Runner up for "Best Technical Achievement" at the Crunchies the other night. Fqwiki is a statement meant to illustrate how ridiculously naive we have become with respect to "innovative technology". Neither Fqwiki nor Qwiki belong even remotely in the same league as Google's Self Driving Cars (which won for Best Technical Achievement).<p>Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time, however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation" actually means.<p>Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.<p>Yours,<p>Banksy The Lucky Stiff
Sigh. Tech startups aren't ever about the tech. That's not the point.<p>Qwiki isn't about panning around images and playing back TTS. I know that wasn't what the developer was thinking, but I find people making this mistake a lot. Thinking of Facebook as a basic CRUD app you could put together, etc.
I just saw Qwiki for the first time today and watched the Natalie Portman qwiki at <a href="http://www.qwiki.com/q/#Natalie_Portman" rel="nofollow">http://www.qwiki.com/q/#Natalie_Portman</a> and you can count me in as a fan.<p>The clone (viewable at <a href="http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/" rel="nofollow">http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/</a>) definitely does not compare. It's like comparing the first version of Yahoo to today's Google... and Qwiki hasn't even started to improve their product yet.<p>Obviously the author doesn't care for the qwiki format but they are being short sighted. It could be quiet useful, especially as it improves over time in areas of giving you options in how much depth you want, the voice synthesizer, etc, by providing just enough info in a pleasurable format.<p>What I do hate about qwiki is their name. It associates them with wiki's/wikipedia in my mind (without knowing what it is) and it personally is a major turn-off.
> over really disruptive ones like CloudFlare<p>CloudFare provides a great value, but how is it 'disruptive'? Seems like that word is becoming utterly meaningless. Being better at something than your competitors just makes you a good competitor it doesn't make you disruptive. Let's only call something 'disruptive' if it's destroyed an entire industry. P2P disrupted the music industry. Google and Wikipedia disrupted the local library.<p>Just being a new startup with a flashy website doesn't make you automatically 'disruptive' whether you're Qwiki or CloudFlare.
This is disingenuous for several reasons.<p>1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product. I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.<p>2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers, security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?<p>3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.<p>3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to rely on you.
Qwiki's value is no longer in its website because the overall Qwiki site is not too complex, but the value lies within its brand. Winning the TechCrunch award, Qwiki is like TechCrunch/AOL's baby. they talk about it 24/7. Free publicity. 2ndly people know about Qwiki, it is now a person's first instinct when they see a Qwiki type of interactive website. Not everyone knows the site, but for those who does, interactive wiki is forever labeled as "Qwiki". That's something hackers cannot clone.
The same thing could of been said about twitter when it first came out. Recreating the feature set would of been very easy, but ultimately the feature set was not what made them successful.
While I don't find qwiki to be a good way to present data at all and it doesn't add anything for me to say this comes anywhere close is silly, it really proves about as much as someone whipping up a stack overflow clone with a question list with tags, badges and logins over a weekend.<p>As an aside, qwiki decided it would be good to start spamming out qwiki of the day to my email. Guess that is an opt out rather than an opt in....
Anyone here who digs Qwiki's approach to presenting info? I tried it a little bit, found it mind-dumbing, and promptly went back to wikipedia. Anyone found it good for kids maybe?