The Downside

The blogospehere has been all atwitter lately about Nielsen’s latest survey stating that 60% of new Twitter-ers stop using the service after one month.  Many people doubted the number and ribbed Nielsen for perhaps overlooking the fact that many Twitterers use third-party apps to access the site.  But Nielsen checked their math and they’re sticking with their original assertion: 60% of Twitterers leave the site after one month.

I suppose it might be hard to believe that a site that’s growing as fast as Twitter only retains 40% of new users for more than a month, but if you’ve ever run a user-generated content site, you’ll know that 40% retention is fantastic, and most sites would kill for retention like that.  Most users who start a Wordpress blog, a Flickr account, a Delicious account, or an account on just about site, try it out for a day or two and never come back.  It’s the nature of the beast.  Further, most users are consumers, not producers, and while that trend is changing over time with the rise of the over-sharing Millennial generation, most users just don’t feel like sharing their stories, pictures, or current status with the world, so they try it out and then move on.

So congratulations, Twitter!  40% retention is awesome, so keep up the great work!

Update 4/29, 5:21pm: Wolfram updated his blog today and linked to his demo video, and the product does look as niche as I feared.  It is “smart answers” on steriods, and while it may complement regular search results nicely, it’s not moving the field of Internet search and indexing forward at all.  Perhaps it’s the press’s fault for pumping up Alpha as the next Google - clearly it is not, nor are they trying to be.  They’re tackling a relatively small problem (compared to indexing the entire Internet) and they appear to be targeting a small audience (academics and scientists), so we should probably stop discussing Alpha in the same breath as Google, Yahoo, and the rest.  Please move along, nothing to see here.

Much ado has been made lately about Wolfram Alpha, a new-fangled “search engine” due to release in May that promises to give answers to questions that are asked in plain English.  Predictably, it’s much ado about nothing.  Techcrunch responded today to leaked screenshots by sitting on both sides of the fence, saying it’s unlikely Wolfram has “something Google doesn’t or can’t build in a year,” while also saying that their own guest editor’s predictions of Wolfram’s search greatness are “persuasive.”  Which is it, guys?

Let me boil it down for you based on what I’ve read so far: Wolfram Alpha’s pitch is that their search engine is built to answer plain English “computational” questions, i.e. questions that have specific answers that can be calculated.  To do this, they are sucking in all the databases they can find - population stats, weather stats, census data, geographic data, and any other corpora that are readily available.  

Once they have all the data compiled, they make it mine-able using plain English queries.  In his TechCrunch guest article, Nova Spivack gives three sample queries that are supposed to show the awesome potential of Alpha:

• What country is Timbuktu in?
• How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?
• What is the average rainfall in Seattle?

It’s great that Alpha can answer these, but did Spivack bother to try these queries in Google?  Google gives an answer to every single one in the summary of the top result.  I didn’t even have to click through.  Hopefully these are just shoddy examples from Spivack rather than an example of how lame Alpha actually is.

Here are a few query types I’m hoping Alpha can answer that Google cannot:

• What was Bank of America’s stock price at close on September 11, 2001?
• Is next year a leap year?
• How have home prices in San Diego, CA changed in the last 5 years?

These are questions that have specific answers that can be calculated from readily available data, but (here’s the key) are unlikely to have been written about on the web in a way that would make them findable by Google.  These questions are so specific (long-tail), that Google just won’t have answers sitting around in its index.

I can hear your next question already: if Wolfram Alpha is only good for such long-tail questions, how can it possibly compete with Google?  The answer is: it can’t.  

For all the glowing talk, Alpha appears to be a large set of regular expressions that parse natural language so users can mine a massive database.  This is not dissimilar to how Ask.com worked in the late 90’s when they had a huge, human-built database of question templates allowing them to parse queries and provide links as answers.  Remember how well that worked?

Alpha must be an acquisition play.  They must be developing this answer engine with an eye towards selling it to one of the big players (Google, Yahoo, MS, or even Ask.com) so they can beef up their search results.  All of the majors already have smart answers features (a la Ask.com) that give exact answers to a small set of templatic questions, so acquiring Alpha would make an existing smart answers feature more robust.

TechCrunch reported that an Alpha “insider” today leaked the screenshow below in an attempt to show how Alpha is so much cooler than Google’s smart answers:

Wolfram Alpha Leaked Screenshot

On the left, we have Alpha’s result for a search on “ISS.”  The result it gives is a map and technical details of the Internation Space Station’s orbit.  Wow.  That is a truly horrible result.  Why anyone would leak this to show the power of the engine is beyond me.  Here’s what’s wrong with it:

• Who says I want information about the International Space Station?  Maybe I wanted Internet Security Systems or International Schools Services or info about the company ISS A/S out of Copenhagen.  How about a little disambiguation guys?  Clearly Alpha is not trying to be a comprehensive search engine. 
• Who wants data like that?  If I want info about the International Space Station, I would probably rather see its homepage than some crazy technical data about where it is right this second.
• What happened to the natural language queries, eh?  Showing that your engine can figure out what I meant by a search on “ISS” hardly shows any natural language parsing ability, and conversely shows the complete lack of disambiguation as I discussed above.
• Lastly a nitpicky Product Manager thing: at the top, it says that International Space Station is the “input interpretation” of ISS.  ”Input interpretation”?  Really?  How many users would have any idea what you’re trying to say there?  This is a product made by nerds for nerds.  I’m a nerd, so I can say this.

On the right, we see Google giving a fantastic answer to the query “maine population”.  (I’ll assume that someone changed the text in the query box to read “california population” after looking up Maine first.)  Google 1, Alpha 0.

Ultimately, Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, but rather a data mining language for answers about a relatively small set of known entities.  If you want to know about the International School Services, use Google.  If you want to know where Timbuktu is, use Google.  If you want to know the inclination and orbital period of the International Space Station, then by all means, go ahead and use Wolfram Alpha. (Note: Google gives a pretty good result when searching for “International Space Station Inclination.”)  When Alpha finally sells to one of the majors, it will mostly likely settle in as a feature of a search engine, not a search engine itself.

Caveat: all conclusions I’ve drawn are from the information available now.  We’ll see what it’s actually capable of when it launches in the coming weeks.

Sorry for the hiatus, kids.  It’s been a wild ride the past year or so as I’ve changed jobs, gotten married, and bought an iPhone, but I’ll get back to those topics later.

Today I want to reach out to Tivo, the makers of one of my favorite devices, and ask them to please, please open an app store.  I don’t ask this only for myself, but also for the sake of the Tivo Company, as I believe an app store could save it from the subscriber stagnation and lackluster financial performance that have plagued it lately.  Here are just a few of the wins they could realize:

• No other major DVR offers an app store, so it’s a perfect time to break new ground and put even more ground between themselves and other hardware-based DVRs.  We’ve seen what app stores have done for other platforms like Facebook and iPhone.
• Newer software-based DVRs and media centers are catching up to your functionality, so let third-party developers help you stay ahead of the game.  If you give them a compelling revenue model, they will innovate and keep your device on the cutting edge, so you don’t have to.
• As a DVR that is offered on a standard hardware platform, it should be relatively easy to give developers kits that will let them leverage the hardware.  The PC software-based media centers can’t compete on this because they need to accomodate a plethora of hardware types that users could have.
• In the Tivo, owners already have a functioning computer sitting right there plugged into our TVs, so let third-party developers help us take advantage of its full pontential. 

• Stream my live and recorded shows so I can see them on other PCs or devices that aren’t connected to a Tivo (who needs a Slingobox?)
• Email
• Web browsing
• Instant messaging
• “Widgets” similar to the Yahoo/Samsung offering that could offer sports scores, stock quotes, etc.
• More robust ways to show my media hosted on other devices on my Tivo (current Tivo methods are kludgy)
• And of course…games