Facebook today announced some potentially ‘net-changing features they are releasing under the moniker Open Graph.  Open Graph replaces Facebook connect, or perhaps deprecates it if you like, making it easier for people to utilize their Facebook data within the context of other websites.  Sounds fancy, eh?  Let’s break it down into understandable examples:

Most prominently, websites can embed “Like” buttons on their pages, just as Facebook has on its activity feed items and various other pages around their site.  Website creators will embed these Like buttons because it lets their users publish links they like back to their Facebook feed with a single click – they don’t even need to sign in to the creator’s site, as long as they are already signed in on Facebook - free marketing for the website.

In addition to the Like tool, Facebook offers a variety of other “social plugins” to help site creators make their sites more social and more integrated with Facebook.   The Activity Feed lets users see what their friends are doing on the creator’s site.  Login with Faces shows a user which of their friends are already members of a site and prompts them to sign up with that site to connect with them.  Comments lets users comment on individual items on the creator’s site, and gives them a seamless option to post that comment back to Facebook as well.  All this without having to create an account on the creator’s site.  You get the picture.

Facebook = identity

The most significant immediate implication of Facebooks Open Graph is that site creators may no longer bother having their own registration systems at all, as FriendFeed founder Bret Taylor (now with Facebook) explained.  My interpretation is that Facebook wants to own identity on the web, and site creators are likely to step in line because Facebook has made it in their best interest. If creators adopt the tools, they get free marketing tools and a seamless experience for their users.  All they sacrifice is having to share their user data with Facebook.

Open Graph is easier to implement than Facebook Connect, and people can start interacting with sites immediately, no login required, which is great.   It appears that Facebook will share users’ “basic” information once they connect on a site, so creators get names, email addresses, genders, etc. – all the basic things they would ask for anyway.  Easy for the user, easy for me, everyone wins.

Especially Facebook.  Once Open Graph plugins become widespread, Facebook will know exactly what users are doing…all the time.  They’ll know what sites you visit, and they’ll know what things you Like on those sites.  Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  Big Brother Zuckerberg knows.

Spam bait

Interesting note for you privacy fans: it appears that any data you make public on your profile (which is most of it by default), including things and sites you like, will now be available to other sites so they can tailor their content to your tastes.  Cool? Yes.  Spooky? Yes.  Ripe for abuse? Most definitely.  While I don’t have a problem with this personally because I am pretty careful and sparing about what I share on Facebook, a lot of people are going to get stung, and spammers and direct marketers will try to abuse the system to deliver unsolicited ads.  I wish Facebook well, but this is going to be a hornet’s nest.

The data

Now for what I think is the real meat of all this: the data.  When site creators implement these Like buttons and other plugins, Facebook is encouraging them to tag their pages with specific types of common metadata that may be relevant:  image, name, location, email address, phone number, and “type” (e.g. sport, activity, restaurant, athlete, city, product, book, blog, website, etc.)  If creators take the time to tag their pages like this, then when their users “like” something, Facebook will know exactly what it is and can present it nicely within the Facebook context.

Think about this for a minute. Suddenly, one organization on the web has the ability to know what pages are about without having to crawl every page (and its backlinks) to figure it out.  Site creators are telling Facebook exactly what their pages are about using structured data.  Here is the quote from their Open Graph page that jumped right out at me:

Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.

Search results, eh?  Any page on my site that I tag with structured data can show up in Facebook search.  Facebook could presumably let their users filter the search so it’s for “actors” or “politicians” or “athletes” or whatever type of object.  They can search for activities, landmarks, restaurants near their current location…  This sounds an awful lot like Google, but with 1/100th of the effort that Google goes to when compiling their monstrous index of every page on the Internet.

Even better, all these links are ranked by humans.  Every “Like” button that we press makes this massive index of webpages and real-life offline things smarter.  This is getting impressively close to the holy grail of search: social search.  Not only is it vetted by humans, but it’s real-time – no need to wait for a crawler to poke around every corner of the web.  The best of Google search with the Best of Twitter search in one package.

Google is surely watching these development keenly, and probably wishing they had acquired Facebook back when they had the chance.  Microsoft is surely dancing a jig.  (Hey Stumbleupon: love you guys, but it’s time to pack up your bags and go home.)

If I was Google, I’d give an arm and a leg for all this data.  With Microsoft being a major investor in Facebook, don’t be surprised to see this data integrated into Bing in the not-too-distant future.

For several years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that social networks have been divorced from web mail.  Seems like a natural fit, right?  If you’re already logging into a site that knows who your friends are, why not help me keep in touch with those friends beyond the simple “send an email” option?

Some of you may remember that Yahoo has  been taking steps to integrate their web mail with social networking (and other daily tasks) for a while now.  Facebook wants to add mail to their social network.  Google decided to play catch up today and released Google Buzz, as covered really, really, really extensively by TechCrunch and others.

What is Google Buzz?  Imagine your Facebook feed interspersed with your email, and that’s pretty much it.  When one of your contacts updates her Google status, you’ll see it in your Gmail inbox, and you can comment on it, making it show up in her Gmail inbox again.  Adding a little jab at Foursquare, Google will also allow you to geo-tag these status updates, which makes perfect sense if you’re updating from a mobile device.

So it’s fun, it’s cool, but…it’s a couple years too late.  Most of us just finished building out our Facebook friends lists, and we have co-workers, classmates, and our parents on it now, so I don’t really need another way to announce my status updates to my contacts.  Will I use it?  Yeah, occasionally, but I have far more friends on Facebook than I have contacts on Gmail.  Not everyone uses Gmail, y’know?

This is not a new concept or a new feature, it’s just a more convenient tool for current Gmail users to keep their friends and family up-to-date.  Hopefully TechCrunch will stop flogging this as soon as the “buzz” dies down.

Google today released a new version of their toolbar, including a sneaky little feature called Sidewiki that allows users to leave comments on any page on the web.  As noted by Techcrunch, it’s not an original idea; many others have tried this model, but none have succeeded.  Google has an advantage here because they are attaching the feature to their toolbar, which already has a significant userbase, but the idea still has significant challenges.

We know that people are generally motivated by fortune or fame, and Knol – Google’s last failed UGC attempt — offered fortune and fame, but failed anyways.  Sidewiki offers neither.  There’s no monetary aspect to Sidewiki at all, and you’ll only gain fame among the few other people who actually decide to turn their Sidewiki sidebar on for that particular page (Sidewiki comments only show up on the page they were added to, and do not show up across an entire site.)

So why would Google put this out there?  Because if anyone uses it at all, it gives them meta data to improve their web search.  Nothing helps Google classify a page more than text on or about a page, and by giving users one more venue to leave comments, they are looking to improve their ability to index and classify those pages.  PaidContent quotes Google’s product manager saying:

“It gives (people) a reason to come back to a page.  I’m sure some publishers will have some objections to something like this but (at the same time) many traditional publishers also objected to blogs.”

Firstly, publishers put comments on their sites “to give people a reason to come back,” so why do they need some parallel comment system that gives them no SEO benefit?  They’d be better off adding Disqus.  Second, how are blogs analogous to Sidewiki?  Sidewiki sits on the side of any page like a leech, taking conversation away from the actual page, while blogs are just independent publications that traditional publishers have no right to object to.  A more suitable analogy would be the framing of sites that publishers have objected to for years because they lose visibility into what people are saying about their site.

I’m not saying that publishers should protest this move, but it’s disingenuous of Google to position this as a service they’re providing for the betterment of the web.  They’re providing it to benefit themselves, just like the Google Image Labeler, which looks like a game but really powers Google’s image search, and their recent acquisition of Recaptcha which is a security tool that also happens to aid their book digitization efforts.

I tried out Sidewiki, and of course there isn’t much out there yet.  All I found was a self-proclaimed “Social Media Specialist” who provided a brief summary of CNN on CNN.com’s homepage.  If Google had provided the Wikipedia page for CNN, it would have been better.  Sidewiki would probably be more useful for the long tail pages of the web that could use some elaboration, but that’s exactly where it’s unlikely to be viewed because users have to explicitly open their Sidewiki window to look for comments that have been left.

I can see the system quickly becoming full of spam, self-promotion, and random chatter.  Google provides user ratings, saying it will help the good comments filter to the top, but 1) that will disrupt the order of responsive comments which are sure to arise and 2) it will be gamed because there are no moderators overseeing the system.  Wikis are powerful because they have moderators, and this system will fail in the long run because it has none.

To wrap up, I wouldn’t bother using Sidewiki – it will linger for a year or two like most of Google’s social media efforts, and when Google sees that the comments they are getting are spam and conversation, they’ll realize it’s not helping their index, and they’ll shut it down.

Over the past few months, Yahoo has been quietly adding more and more features to their webmail solution, Yahoo Mail.  For three years (from the sidelines), I’ve been hoping they would do this, and finally it looks like they’re getting the message.  Perhaps it’s Carol Bartz’ leadership, I don’t know, but Yahoo is finally polishing and rebuilding the biggest weapon in their arsenal.

In the past few months, Yahoo Mail has added support for large attachments (via Drop.io), added various Facebook-like “apps” from companies like Evite, Flickr, and Paypal, and they acquired Xoopit to improve their photo sharing and sending abilities.  They even started allowing Facebook style “status casting” which is equivalent to the Facebook news feed, allowing people to keep track of what their friends and family are up to.

These moves show a new, long-overdue dedication to email.  Yahoo has 350 million email users worldwide, and they have finally realized that email is their Trojan horse that will let them cross-promote and upgrade users to all of their other media properties and services.  Everyone needs email, and very little innovation has happened in the email space in the last 15 years.  If Yahoo can innovate and make social networking and messaging readily accessible and imminently usable for their already enormous audience within an email context, they have a chance to create some major buzz and hold off the Facebooks of the world that are out to eat their lunch.  Just imagine if Facebook started offering actual email addresses – Yahoo would face a serious threat.  Yahoo already has massive reach, all they need to hold off Facebook are tools that let that massive audience connect with each other.

The biggest question I have is whether it is too late.  Gmail was integrated with its IM solution from Day 1, but Yahoo Mail still isn’t well tied to Yahoo Messenger.  Why weren’t my Yahoo Messenger contacts automatically added to my Mail address book so I can see my friends updates?  This is a huge oversight and has hamstrung adoption of the Yahoo news feeds and status updates, but I’m hopeful Yahoo will move to correct this.

Also interesting is that Yahoo is innovating on its email solution while Google is reinventing email entirely with Google Wave.  I haven’t had the chance to say this often, but Yahoo’s approach is right, and Google’s is wrong.  Google Wave is too innovative, too paradigm shifting to gain widespread adoption in the next few years, and unfortunately it’s the kind of product that isn’t worth anything until the people you’re communicating with use it too.  Yahoo, on the other hand, is innovating on email incrementally, making their interfaces more streamlined, and making ancillary features like attachments and photo sharing more native and intuitive.  If Yahoo can get the social piece right, too, they may start grabbing headlines with their features again rather than for their deal-making and constant games of executive musical chairs.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, guys – honestly, there just haven’t been a lot of interesting developments in the digital media area lately.  So, I’ll just tackle a few smaller topics today.

Pointless Twittering: According to a study by Pear Analytics, 40% of Tweets are “Pointless Babble” with another 38% being “Conversational” (which I suppose is a step above Pointless Babble.  A small step.)  Only 3.6% of posts were classified as news, confirming my assertion that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information.  If you’re in the market for pointless babble or conversation, now you know where to go.  On a side note, I love the use of the term “pointless babble” in serious research.

Celeb name power: The social media press should stop talking about Hunch.com just because it was started by a Flickr founder.  It’s not interesting and it’s not (as the press keeps calling it) social Q&A; it’s social polling, more akin to  Sodahead or even the old-school Coolquiz than Yahoo! Answers or my baby.  With social Q&A you get to ask a question any way you want and let other people answer your question.  On Hunch, you can’t ask a question at all – you have to search for decision-making wizards that other users have already created.  And even then, it’s only good for making decisions like whether you should mow your lawn or whether you should renew your World of Warcraft subscription.  If you want to know why the sky is blue or what sights to see in Istanbul, you’re out of luck.  Yawn.  The initial burst of traffic they got from the press is fading, although not as precipitously as Wolfram Alpha’s.

Dumb, smart!: Radio Shack is smart to try rebranding as The Shack because they have nothing to lose.  Their old brand stands for irritable, aggressive salespeople, batteries, and out-of-date, no-name electronics devices, so they could stand to shed some of that.  Pizza Hut, on the other hand, is nuts to drop the ‘Pizza’ and call themselves The Hut.  They will forever be associated with Jabba, and there was nothing terribly wrong with their brand as it was.  The Hut says they changed the name to allow them to broaden their menu, but I say if Burger King can sell salads, you guys can sell just about anything short of sushi.  Don’t get me started on Syfy.

Microyawn: I suppose the whole Yahoo-Microsoft deal is big news, but for the average web user, it just won’t mean anything.  Yahoo search results will look different.  Big deal.

Wake me when Google Wave comes out.  It’s way too overblown to gain any mass-market acceptance, but at least it’ll be a fun toy for tech geeks like myself.

It’s always fun to see a trailblazing product get announced and then watch the press run around trying to figure out what it is, what it means, and why it’s important.  The latest occasion for this kind of tomfoolery is Google’s announcement yesterday of the Chrome OS.  Here’s my take on it:

What it is

Chrome OS is the Chrome browser plus a version of Linux that is built to run a single application: the Chrome browser.  The “applications” that run on Chrome OS are what we have traditionally thought of as web sites, pages, or services, things like Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, Delicious, or pretty much anything else that starts with http.  These include services like Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets.

What it isn’t

A traditional operating system.  You can’t install Photohop, MS Office, iTunes, Yahoo messenger, AIM, or any other OS-based application you’re used to.  If you want to play MP3s, you’ll have to find a site or service that will do that like Pandora or Orb.  If you want to IM, you’ll need a web-based IM like Meebo.  If you want to edit pictures, you’ll need a web-based photo editor like Aviary’s Phoenix.

What we don’t know

• It’s unclear if Google will build hooks into Chrome to allow it to manipulate local files.
• It’s also unclear how much access web applications would have to peripherals.  I don’t know if I can just plug it into an iPod, webcam, or external hard drive and have it work.  Google claims that Chrome apps would run on any standards compliant browser, and that functionality just isn’t part of the current browser model, so I’m guessing these peripherals would not work.

What it means

Chrome OS, at release, will be built primarily for netbooks.  It will let you boot the netbook quickly and browse the web within seconds.  It’s good for people who want access to the web anywhere and aren’t doing heavy-duty computing like hardcore PC games, Photoshop, or even complex Excel spreadhseets or Powerpoint presentations. It definitely isn’t going to be useful as a media center.

A netbook with Chrome OS is what used to be known as a thin client or a Network Computer, but with real graphics capabilities.  It’s meant for mobile computing, and it will only threaten Microsoft’s Windows OS in the ultra-portable netbook space for the foreseeable future.  Windows 7 need not worry.

As for the press’ coverage, it’s largely regurgitations of the Google Press Release with a dash of analysis and a double helping of “maybe it’ll be important…you decide.”  But then…we have TechCrunch, which is getting harder and harder to describe as a “news outlet.”

Today Michael Arrington brags about how he predicted the Google OS in September of ’08, despite the fact that rumors have been flying since at least ’06 admittedly without the “Chrome” moniker.  In his “prescient” article, he claims

Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.

Not true at all.  As Google made clear in their latest announcement, Chrome OS will still require Linux as the traditional OS it runs on top of.  He goes on to grandly pronounce

Expect to see millions of web devices, even desktop web devices, in the coming years that completely strip out the Windows layer and use the browser as the only operating system the user needs.

Firstly, the browser still needs Linux, and let’s not forget our history – the pioneers of computing have been talking about the thin client since 1993 and the similar Network Computer since 1996, both of which follow the same model as the Google OS, so he wasn’t exactly going out on a limb there.  Why he felt the need to brag about his tardy prediction again today, I can’t say.

Certainly there are still questions to be answered about Chrome OS and I don’t think it will be a game changer in the next couple years, but it is a step forward in making mobile computing cheaper and more convenient.  We’ll still need our PC’s with real OS’s to do real work, but this could indeed take a big bite out MS’s dominance in the low-end PC market, particularly when wireless data plans become more affordable.  Of course, don’t expect MS to be silent – they’re working on their own browser-based OS as well.

Update: 3:19pm

By way of Valleywag (bravo VW), I noticed Dave Winer’s summation of the Chrome OS, and he almost gets it right.  He says:

Let’s be dispassionate. Before yesterday’s announcement: 1. Chrome ran on Linux. 2. Linux was an operating system. 3. Linux ran on netbooks.  However, most people want XP on their netbook, not Linux. That was true yesterday and it’s still true today.

I think this is mostly accurate, but I think Google is trying to create a different class of device that is actually different from today’s netbooks and therefore, it isn’t a question of Linux vs. XP.  A Chrome netbook will boot directly to a browser window, and everyone knows how to use a browser, so it avoids the typical Linux geekiness.  The fact that it only runs a browser clearly makes it much less feature rich than XP, but it’s also much faster and cheaper.  Maybe it needs a new name to signify its limited abilities – micro netbook or browserbook or something…but I agree with Dave that calling this an OS is really just a marketing maneuver.

Google today announced the impending release of their new…product, Google Wave.  I hesitate when describing it, because it’s actually pretty tough to categorize.  Techcrunch has a thorough writeup of the functionality and Mashable has a brief of their own, but neither does much analysis, so let me try to summarize.

Google Wave is:

• Like email, but won’t work (navtively) with existing email
• Like IM, but it isn’t an application
• Like Facebook messaging, but without Facebook
• Like Facebook’s application platform, but without Facebook
• Like Twitter, but without a public-facing feed
• Like IRC, but less temporal

Does that help?  Maybe not.

Let me try to sum it up in a positioning statement that I’m making up based on the proposed featureset:

Google Wave is a web-based messaging system that helps people communicate, share, and collaborate with friends, family, and business contacts both in real-time and asynchronously.

If we look at it in these terms, Google Wave is not only extremely ambitious but is also set squarely against Facebook.

You may consider this comparison invalid because Google Wave has so many features that Facebook doesn’t and Facebook has a ton of features that Wave doesn’t, but users don’t look at features, they look at problems the product solves for them.  Is it filling a need that isn’t met right now, or is it filling the need better than existing services?  It’s unlikely that people would give up Facebook for Wave, so the question for Google comes down to: will they use both? You can ask the same question about Wave vs. email, IM, and Twitter.

In order to think Wave will be successful, you have to think the problems it solves are important.  Here are some of the problems it purports to address:

• It’s hard to communicate and collaborate with friends over email / IM / other web services
• There are too many ways to communicate with people online – I want a single method
• Email, IM, and online messaging don’t allow collaboration, and allow limited use of multimedia
• Email is not a dynamic communication mechanism
• It’s hard to share my email conversations with people who aren’t in the conversation
• “When (messaging is) not live, you lose your attention on a conversation, but when you see it live, you’re engaged.” (I remember the days of using “talk” when you could see the other person typing and correcting themselves as they type – it actually kind of sucks.)
• “IM and email shouldn’t really be two separate tools”
• I want to allow “anonymous comments, or a number of different identities” in my conversations

This is just a start of what they want it to do.  One of the creators, Lars, said of Wave,

“My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things.”

Is it trying to do too much?  Very likely.

I fear that Wave breaks one of Google’s own product development tenets: fail often, fail early (or maybe fail early, fail often, I don’t remember, but I know there was a lot of failing involved.)  This project has been in development since 2007 and has 50 developers working on it, and it already has a plethora of what we product managers call “would-be-nice” features.  I encourage Google to make sure the core features work and release this thing as soon as possible to see if people like it at all.  If they like it, THEN add the silly extras like real-time wiki-style collaborative editing that lets you see what other people type as they type it.

I do like the concept behind Wave in how it aims to unify communication, but I want to see that happen in a way that simplifies my life.  Read through the comments on the TechCrunch article, and you’ll see that most people think it looks too complicated.  As a contrast, no one who saw the iPod or iPhone unveilings thought either device would complicate their lives – they are both beautiful in their simplicity, and that’s why they sell by the boatloads.  Google will have an uphill battle marketing this product until they can show an average user how it will simplify their lives. If they clear this hurdle, Facebook needs to watch out.

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.