Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

I just saw Qwiki for the first time today and watched the Natalie Portman qwiki at http://www.qwiki.com/q/#Natalie_Portman and you can count me in as a fan.

The clone (viewable at http://banksytheluckystiff.github.com/fqwiki/) 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.

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.

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.

Wow, I watched that video and now hate Qwiki. That's the most useless, annoying way to present information I've ever seen.

lol Hate is a pretty strong word. You sure it's appropriate for what you're feeling?

Have you ever heard someone say that they "love" an Apple product?

I actually like it and it feel it has some legs. In an era of TL;DR (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl;dr),it seems to be a good way to get a bunch of trivial information really fast. The audience here may not be the target market. We spend a lot more time reading content on the www pretty intensely (well I do anyway), but a 2 minute presentation on a subject I am casually interested in seems worthwhile.

Its name associates it with Wikipedia because that its data source. Qwiki recites Wikipedia article summaries.

Doesn't seem quite as magical anymore, eh?

I knew that it got the info from wikipedia. I still don't like the name.

I watched both (well I forced myself to watch as much as possible, because its annoying and prefer to read than listening to it) and in terms of the content, it seems identical. I think fqwiki could be iterated on very quickly to include better visuals. Other than that, I really don't see a huge difference. What do you find to be the biggest difference to say it doesn't compare ?

Fqwiki worked on my iPad. Qwiki did not.

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