But "Web Applications" is just the first of many new StackOverflow-like sites on the horizon, and surprisingly, the next sites to launch may not be tech-focused at all. ]]> Stack Exchange Uses Crowd-Sourcing to Launch New Sites

StackOverflow, the original site that led to the Stack Exchange network's creation was founded by Joel Spolsky, author and CEO of bug-tracking software company Fog Creek Software, and respected developer Jeff Atwood back in 2008. The idea was to create an alternative to the market leader at the time, Experts-Exchange (EE). Where EE was a fee-based site, the vision for StackOverflow was to offer a simpler, entirely free site where you could get the same type of assistance from knowledgeable users. To encourage participation, site users vote up the best answers to questions and those whose answers are voted on receive boosts in their "reputation" scores.

Earlier this year, the company raised $6 million from Union Square Ventures and announced plans to launch a handful of targeted sites running the same software. Spolsky said that the future sites would be determined by an automated process where community members propose a site, establish the site's ground rules and gather a team of core experts who commit to the site. When a critical mass has been built up (the boiling point determined by algorithms alone), the site opens. You can see this process in action now in StackExchange's new staging area, dubbed "Area51." Here, you can track the proposed sites, how many people have committed to them, details about the site's plans and goals, and, once launched, stats on number of users, questions, answers, views and more.

Web Applications, the Q&A site for "expert and advanced users of Web applications" was the first site to go through this automated launch process and a site for "Gaming" is now hot on its heels.

While the newest addition to the network is certainly a handy resource (we already learned how to print a Google Wave and organize Gmail labels), it's the site staging area that's the most impressive part of this whole venture. Instead of the company having to think up ideas, gather interest, entice experts to sign up and encourage people to join, the entire process has been offloaded to the community itself to handle. It's crowd-sourcing at its best.

Beyond Tech: StackOverflow's for Cooking, Guitar and Grammar?

The site staging area will allow Stack Exchange to extend beyond its tech roots, assuming the future proposals in Area51 prove popular enough to reach the launch stage. Sites for food and cooking, English language and its usage, home improvement, photography, board games, coffee, guitars and other less-technical hobbies are listed among the geekier topics like SEO, game development, GIS, user interface design, healthcare IT and more.

The question now is how will these niche Stack Exchange sites compete with the one-stop shops, like the recently launched Question and Answer service Quora, which provides a single destination to ask questions about anything? Or the more personal Q&A offering from Formspring, which lets individuals share answers with a community on conversational topics. Plus, we can't ignore the fact that Facebook, too, is planning a Q&A app called "Questions." Can anything complete when Facebook - and its nearly half a billion users - get involved? And will Stack Exchange's niche answers fare as well as Yahoo Answers when it comes to being highly ranked by Google's algorithms?

Stack Exchange's move from a tech-related resource to a network of sites with broader appeal is a smart move, given the interest in the question-and-answer space at this time. But it also opens it up to bigger competition as well. It was one thing to take down Experts Exchange, but can it do the same with Facebook and Yahoo?

Will Google Make us Stupid?

"I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net's effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking."- Nicholas Carr

"Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world." - Hal Varian, Google, chief economist

"It's a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things ('more stupid') requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information ('more intelligent')." - Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada

"The problem isn't Google; it's what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves." - Esther Dyson, longtime Internet expert and investor

"People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I'm wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth." - Craig Newmark, founder Craig's List

"The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult." - John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org

Will The Internet Enhance and Improve Writing, Reading and the Rendering of Knowledge?

"Most writing online is devolving toward SMS and tweets that involve quick, throwaway notes with abbreviations and threaded references. This is not a form of lasting communication. In 2020 there is unlikely to be a list of classic tweets and blog posts that every student and educated citizen should have read." - Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council

"This is a distinction without a metric. I think long‐form expressive fiction will suffer (though this suffering has been more or less constant since the invention of radio) while all numeric and graphic forms of rendering knowledge, from the creation and use of databases to all forms of visual display of data will be in a golden age, with ordinary non‐fiction writing getting a modest boost. So, English majors lose, engineering wins, and what looks like an Up or Down question says more about the demographic of the answerer than any prediction of the future." - Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

"When I was a boy, homework consisted of writing a paragraph. Now, youth writing paragraphs in a blink of an eye. They are mastering language only to reinvent it. They are using it in new forms. Tags. Labels. Acronyms. And the game becomes a written game of who can use written word most effectively. Reading, writing, and communicating will become much more fluid as youth are more engaged in the practice of these skills, and have a greater motivation to practice their skills." - Robert Cannon, senior counsel for internet law at Federal Communications Commission

"When writing itself appeared, philosophers feared that it would weaken memory and degrade intelligence. But it allowed for a great, albeit externalized memory and an enlarged, albeit shared intelligence. [...] The Internet will have similar effects, with some losses but, on balance, more gains." - Mark U. Edwards, senior advisor to the Dean, Harvard University Divinity School

"More people are reading and writing, and in more ways, for more readers and other writers, than ever before, and the sum of all of it goes up every day." - Doc Searls, co‐ author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto"

Will Online Anonymity Have Gone the Way of the Dodo by 2020?

"The privacy and civil liberties battles over the next decade will increasingly focus on the growing demands for identity credentials. New systems for authentication will bring new problems as more identity information will create new opportunities for criminals. Identity management companies will also go bankrupt and try to sell off their primary asset ‐‐ the biometric identifiers of their customers." - Marc Rotenberg, executive director, Electronic Privacy Information Center

"Anonymity online will gradually become a lot like anonymity in the real world. When we encounter it, we'll take a firm grip on our wallet and leave the neighborhood as soon as possible ‐‐ unless we're doing something we're ashamed of." - Stewart Baker,

"'It will be an archipelago of named users, who get a lot of value from participating in that part of the ecosystem, but still set in an ocean of anonymity." ‐‐ Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University

"Anonymity will continue to have its place; that is the architecture of the web and it will be difficult to change that. Nonetheless, I believe that verified identity will come to be seen as an added value in transactions (including conversations) and as a way to recognize more value (reward in financial or ego terms)." ‐‐ Jeff Jarvis, prominent blogger, professor, City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

You can find the full report with almost 50 pages of quotes about a number of additional topics on the Pew Center's website.

Update 4/30: We just posted our screenshots here.

Alpha, which will go live within the next few weeks, is quite different from Google and really doesn't directly compete with it at all. Instead of searching the web for info, Alpha is built around a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources. Alpha then organizes and computes this knowledge with the help of sophisticated Natural Language Processing algorithms. Users can ask Alpha any kind of question, which can be constructed just like a Google search (think: "hurricane bob" or "carbon steel strength").

In today's demo, for example, Stephen Wolfram searched for "internet users in europe," or "weather oakland" - two queries that most users would also use in Google or any other search engine.

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its "search" results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don't even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case).

Alpha, of course, doesn't hide its relationship with Mathematica. Indeed, according to Stephen Wolfram, Alpha is built on top of 5 million lines of Mathematica code which currently run on top of about 10,000 CPUs (though Wolfram is actively expanding its server farm in preparation for the public launch).

Alpha can handle a lot of the mathematical questions that Mathematica can compute today (think: "integrate x^3 sin^2 x dx"), but every query will only run for a few seconds, so really complex queries will inevitable time out. Mathematica, however, will also be one of the first programs to make use of the Alpha API, so that Mathematica users will be able to access Alpha's repository of data.

Alpha also has a sophisticated knowledge of physics and chemistry data, and during today's demo, we also saw examples for nutritional information, weather, and census data. Most of the data in the system is curated, but real-time financial data or weather information will go through a system that checks the data for validity, so that outliers can be identified as potentially faulty information.

Pro Version

Alpha will come in a free version, but there will also be a paid version, which will allow users to download and upload data to Alpha. Stephen Wolfram did not go into too much detail, including pricing, but pro users will, for example, be able to not just see a graph, but also download the data behind this graph for use on their own machines or in Mathematica.

Embedding and Alerts

Wolfram is clearly taking a page from the modern Internet playbook and will allow users to embed not just a Wolfram|Alpha search box on their own pages, but they will also be able to embed results and a custom Alpha portal on their own sites. Users will also be able to receive email alerts when a result changes.

A Few More Random Notes

• every search results page on Alpha will feature a link to the sources it used to compute the results
• when a fact is disputed, Alpha will note this in a footnote
• Alpha will only be in English for now - Wolfram notes that this was already a very hard task and that the company does not currently have the resources to replicate its natural language processing techniques for other languages
• money: alpha will feature ads in a sidebar, but Wolfram will also partner with other corporate entities. He didn't go into any details, but it sounded like these corporate partnerships might include other search engines.
• Wolfram will release toolbars for FF and IE, as well as an IE8 accelerator
• Alpha will also display results from traditional search engines (Google, Live, Yahoo) and will feature links to relevant Wikipedia articles

Will it Kill Google?

No. Wolfram|Alpha will be an amazing product, but it's quite different from Google and other search engines. Indeed, maybe it is actually wrong to call it a search engine at all (and Wolfram prefers to call it a "computational knowledge engine"). If you wanted to know what sights to see on your next trip to New York City, for example, Alpha, from what we've seen so for, will not be able to help you.

Alpha, however, will probably be a worthy challenger for Wikipedia and many textbooks and reference works. Instead of looking up basic encyclopedic information there, users can just go to Alpha instead, where they will get a direct answer to their question, as well as a nicely presented set of graphs and other info.

Today's demo mostly focused on math and engineering data, so we'll still have to wait and see how Alpha copes with questions about historical events, for example.

Every product, of course, looks good in a controlled demo (though Stephen Wolfram also happily entertained questions from the audience for almost an hour), and we will have to wait and see how well Alpha performs when faces with real questions from real users. Based on what we've seen today though, it seems rather unlikely that Alpha will be the next Cuil.