searching

Want to find the wisdom of the past in a different way to searching? iWise is an interesting new venture which has launched in a pretty comprehensive way to help you connect with the wisdom of the world.

Found via Techcrunch, it looks at first glance like a ‘Twitter for dead people’, with topic lists on popular themes, and the ability to follow famous quotable characters.

You can Tweet out good quotes, see searches from the Web/Twitter, receive private DM’s in your Twitter feed, use the free iPhone app, or use the API which ties into the semantic search engine that powers the service.

Which is all pretty effective, but the use of Twitter as an entry point, while familiar, does lead to unfavourable questions.

Whereas Wolphram Alpha attempts to reorganise knowledge in the manner of the familiar search interface, or Twine appears as a semantic service in the ‘social bookmarking’ family, iWise look like a blog site front end, married to the Twitter-like ‘Wisdom Tree’.

And there is a good range of sources. For instance, alongside the expected appearance of Einstein come the likes of Bruce Sterling or Peter Doherty (Peter? When did the controversial singer become so formal?).

The problem is that by proving a microblogging platform to consume wisdom and quotes (and provide your own after checking they don’t already exist), you’re led by the Twitter-like interface to expect more social interaction.

And wondering whether it would have made more sense as a lightweight Twitter app, rather than integration as a feature of an apparently heavyweight semantic search engine.

Microblogging is eminently popular, but if the success of forums, blogs, social networks and now microblogging shows us, the usability experience of functionality tends to evolve into a common approach which leads to certain expectations. And if you’re going to play around with that, it’s going to have to be something pretty radical and shocking.