

Hacker Shows It Doesn’t Take $8 Million to Clone Qwiki - sharescribe
http://newsgrange.com/hacker-shows-it-doesnt-take-8-million-to-clone-qwiki-just-321-lines-of-html-will-do-the-trick/

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banksy
Qwiki won Runner up for "Best Technical Achievement" at the Crunchies the
other night. Fqwiki is a statement meant to illustrate how ridiculously naive
we have become with respect to "innovative technology". Neither Fqwiki nor
Qwiki belong even remotely in the same league as Google's Self Driving Cars
(which won for Best Technical Achievement).

Building a great company is about more than a hacked-up prototype built in six
hours and, with luck, Qwiki might achieve this status. At the same time,
however, Qwiki is being disingenuous in promoting a nonexistent technological
breakthrough that falsely sets expectations for what "technical innovation"
actually means.

Misinformed investors and entrepreneurs will only bring us closer to a bubble
that may some day pop. Don't let the hype fool you.

Yours,

Banksy The Lucky Stiff

~~~
neurotech1
I couldn't agree more about the "great company" part. I am 99.9% sure that
that Qwiki has more tech behind it than simply going for wikipedia articles.
From what I heard at TC Disrupt, they have some content search & discovery
tech behind it.

Many "great" companies took off because of good execution, not some huge
technology breakthrough.

That said, your Fqwiki is still cool.

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dangrover
Sigh. Tech startups aren't ever about the tech. That's not the point.

Qwiki isn't about panning around images and playing back TTS. I know that
wasn't what the developer was thinking, but I find people making this mistake
a lot. Thinking of Facebook as a basic CRUD app you could put together, etc.

~~~
melvinram
Exactly. It's not the how it's done... it's the problem being solved and how
elegantly the problem is being solved.

~~~
il
It really seems to me that Qwiki is a solution I'n search of a problem.

What problem is it really solving? Could you ever imagine yourself paying for
Qwiki?

~~~
melvinram
I could imaging paying for a sponsored link at the end of the presentation or
below the presentation if someone was watching a presentation on something
relevant to my products/services.

The problem: People generally prefer not to read. Yet, people are curious
creatures. If they could quench their curiosity without having to read, they
will.

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dstein
_The problem: People generally prefer not to read._

In Mac OS I have keymapped Option-S assigned to the built-in text-to-speech on
the fly, so anytime there's text on any page that I want read back to me I can
quickly do so with a keystroke.

You know what? I never use it. I generally prefer to read.

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melvinram
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.

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

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

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

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btipling
> over really disruptive ones like CloudFlare

CloudFare provides a great value, but how is it 'disruptive'? Seems like that
word is becoming utterly meaningless. Being better at something than your
competitors just makes you a good competitor it doesn't make you disruptive.
Let's only call something 'disruptive' if it's destroyed an entire industry.
P2P disrupted the music industry. Google and Wikipedia disrupted the local
library.

Just being a new startup with a flashy website doesn't make you automatically
'disruptive' whether you're Qwiki or CloudFlare.

~~~
dstein
What I'm tired about reading are these startups who actually have invented no
technology whatsoever, being called innovative technology companies.

Qwiki didn't invent the Text-to-Speech system they're using. And they didn't
create any of the content. They made a flash file that plays back audio and
video -- a technology they also didn't invent. What is remarkable is that
technology investors (even really rich ones like a Facebook co-founder) are
investing money into things that aren't even technological innovations at all.
It's like even they don't know the difference.

~~~
melvinram
<http://www.google.com/search?q=define:technology>

Technology - the practical application of science to commerce or industry

Looks to me like they have applied the knowledge of Text-to-Speech,
audio/video playback, content curation, etc. to the practical problem of
communicating information.

Innovation is not only doing something new but also using existing knowledge
and tools to solve a problem differently.

I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the
option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority
would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem
differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.

~~~
StavrosK
Not to sound snarky, but I liked this sentence:

> I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the
> option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority
> would choose qwiki. If that's not proof that they are solving a problem
> differently, than we'll just have agree to disagree.

It basically says, "I think Qwiki is solving a problem, and if you don't find
my opinion proof enough, then we just can't agree on it."

~~~
melvinram
I agree that it's not the most elegant way to state what I was saying. What I
meant to say was:

I'd wager good money that if you gave a random sample of 1000 people the
option of either reading a wikipedia page or watching a qwiki, a majority
would choose qwiki. If you don't think that assumption is a safe assumption,
than we'll just have agree to disagree.

~~~
mike-cardwell
I'd wager the opposite. People looking up information like to scan well
presented text, not watch a slide show.

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jpadvo
This is disingenuous for several reasons.

1) They just received $8 million in funding to further develop their product.
I.e. That money hasn't been spent making it a better product yet.

2) A few hundred lines of markup does not a product make. What about servers,
security, user accounts, marketing, documentation, etc?

3) Polishing a product so it looks nice and has very few bugs is a huge amount
of work. If he made a slick, bug-free clone I would be impressed.

3.5) ...especially with an automated system like this. It is easy to create
something that automatically generates a shoddy result. It can be fiendishly
hard to automatically generate something useful often enough for people to
rely on you.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Not disingenuous at all. Qwiki won an award for technology innovation, the
quick demo simply proved that their was nothing special or unique about Qwiki.
Re your three points:

1) What does their future development plans have to do with anything? 2) What
does server admin, marketing and documentation have to do wtih technological
innovation? 3) What does debugging have to do with technological innovation?

~~~
jpadvo
I was responding to the claim in the title about "cloning" Qwiki. What Banksy
did was nowhere near cloning Qwiki.

Turns out that Banksy is just claiming to have built a proof-of-concept
showing that the underlying technology is simple. You are right that the three
points I made don't have much at all to do with technological innovation.
Point granted. :)

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imkevingao
Qwiki's value is no longer in its website because the overall Qwiki site is
not too complex, but the value lies within its brand. Winning the TechCrunch
award, Qwiki is like TechCrunch/AOL's baby. they talk about it 24/7. Free
publicity. 2ndly people know about Qwiki, it is now a person's first instinct
when they see a Qwiki type of interactive website. Not everyone knows the
site, but for those who does, interactive wiki is forever labeled as "Qwiki".
That's something hackers cannot clone.

~~~
teaspoon
What is a non-interactive wiki?

~~~
gloob
A euphemism for "web page".

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sharescribe
The hype cycle is a beautiful thing when you are on the receiving end.
Unfortunately many worthy projects and concepts never get that opportunity.

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erik_landerholm
The same thing could of been said about twitter when it first came out.
Recreating the feature set would of been very easy, but ultimately the feature
set was not what made them successful.

~~~
ryanb
No one ever claimed that Twitter was a technological breakthrough, though.
People are saying that about Qwiki.

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robryan
While I don't find qwiki to be a good way to present data at all and it
doesn't add anything for me to say this comes anywhere close is silly, it
really proves about as much as someone whipping up a stack overflow clone with
a question list with tags, badges and logins over a weekend.

As an aside, qwiki decided it would be good to start spamming out qwiki of the
day to my email. Guess that is an opt out rather than an opt in....

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aufreak3
Anyone here who digs Qwiki's approach to presenting info? I tried it a little
bit, found it mind-dumbing, and promptly went back to wikipedia. Anyone found
it good for kids maybe?

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bl4k
Does anybody have a link to the HN thread where the clone was first submitted?
I can't find it, thx

~~~
blatherard
This is the article submitted by banksy
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131563>

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bloodbought
Qwiki is the reason why Burst 2.0 will happen in 2012.

