
Announcing Wolfram Community - cleverjake
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/07/23/announcing-wolfram-community/
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codeflo
For a moment, I thought this would be a one-person social network where
Stephen Wolfram can upvote his own posts.

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webwanderings
I thought he launched a Facebook competitor.

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wikiburner
Because his Google competitor went so well? :)

It was really exciting when Alpha launched. It seemed like search was really
going to be shaken up a bit.

I even remember Google being a little nervous, launching a big new public data
service during Wolfram's big demo.

Anyone know what the plans are for Alpha moving forward? Are they now content
with their specialized audience, or are they still trying to go for real
marketshare?

~~~
rz2k
I tried to use it a lot when it came out. It seemed like the strategy would be
to use trial and error as a method for teasing out tricks in the syntax.
However, very little seems standardized, and what works one month, means
something else the next month, so it's difficult to get "good" at using it.

It is also difficult to be explicit about types, such as what you mean if you
input "orange", or "Washington", and it doesn't seem to allow grouping with
parentheses, etc—though admittedly I gave up pretty quickly when I got
inconsistent results.

It probably did become a better "computational engine" than Google Calculator,
once Google Calculator seemed to shift to a smaller focus on what it could do.

At one point I thought maybe its best functionality was as an alternative to
Wikipedia, when comparing different members of a category, because the
information would be consistently structured. Yet, the source data is pretty
terrible. One, because they appear to have had little strategy for keeping it
current, and, two, because without user input it's even more likely that the
source is something bizarre, when with Wikipedia someone with domain specific
knowledge would have been able to lend a hand.

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bonaldi
I use it a lot for natural language unit conversion; it's so much better at
this than everything else — it's like Fantastical compared to Outlook's New
Event dialog.

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rz2k
I can't find a reference to it _anywhere_ , but for a while Google's
calculator processed ridiculously esoteric natural language units.

If I remember it correctly, after a thread on Reddit, they even implemented
"refrigerator heights" and "fingernail years" as units to measure length.

~~~
cleverjake
Could you perhaps be referring to smoots and beard seconds?

~~~
rz2k
I'm not sure about smoots, but beard seconds sounds right, which would mean
that it wasn't all original to the thread I remembered.

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guylhem
It's a great opportunity for all Mathematica users to now share code in a well
curated website, where all the experts will be.

I wonder what will happen to stackexchange.

~~~
omra
I expect it will still exist, after all, there is both AskUbuntu.SE and
ubuntuforums.com. It might start seeing less activity though.

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taliesinb
To celebrate, a Tau-shirt tutorial:
[http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/63417](http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/63417)

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teeja
_We encourage real-name usage to make Community feel more like a family._

Because that worked out so well for G+.

As for W.A., I keep trying to get it to tell me how much ice covers
Antarctica, and it keeps giving me weather reports. No threat of the
singularity showing up in WA-ville anytime soon.

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pibefision
I wonder why they prefer that forum (it seems Liferay), and not Discourse
which is so much better in many ways.

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taliesinb
Probably because Discourse is still risky, however cool it is:
[http://www.discourse.org/buy/](http://www.discourse.org/buy/)

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plg
oh good another social network

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af3
"Announcing vendor lock-in community"... no, thank you!

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msutherl
Vendor lock-in is not avoided when you use large open source software packages
on the order of complexity of Mathematica.

