Picture a science-fiction movie, the Web site founder said: Insome distant future, the intrepid extraterrestrial hero reaches forhis computer and types in a question: "What is Earth?" Pictures flipacross the screen, faster and faster, until the machine pauses on animage of a blue-and-green planet. The camera pans in as the planetstarts to rotate. A soothing, female voice starts speaking: "Earthis the third planet from the sun . . . "
This science-fiction future "starts right here, in this roomtoday," Doug Imbruce told the audience at a technology conferenceand start-up competition sponsored by Tech Crunch last fall. ThenImbruce launched into a pitch of his new site, Qwiki.com,intriguingly subtitled "the Information Experience."
A multimedia encyclopedia, Qwiki.com combines the best of bothscience and art, Imbruce went on to say. The science refers toQwiki's search engine, which crawls through the Internet, pullingtogether text, videos and photographs of whatever search term isentered. The art? Well, it was obvious.
The judges were impressed, awarding Qwiki the top prize for astart-up. Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim liked Qwiki so much that they invested $8million in the project in January. The Web site opened to thegeneral public last week riding high on the news of the investment.
In my brief experience with it, Qwiki does appear to offer a newway for people to take in information on the Internet. The cyborgvoice accompanying the multimedia presentation on the Great BarrierReef tells me about the billions of coral polyps that compose thereef, as I watch a National Geographic video of bright fish dartingaround the reef and take note of a Google map showing me itslocation in the Coral Sea off the coast of northeast Australia.After the presentation, I was offered a menu of related topics andchose one on coral bleaching to learn about how stress causes coralto lose its coloration.
Contrary to the reigning philosophy of online informationprograms - in which speed is considered king - and contrary to itsown name, Qwiki takes time. Seeing all the recent Egypt coverage, Iyearned for an easy-access primer. Scanning a Wikipedia entry onEgypt took a few seconds. Watching a movie on Qwiki and listening tothe measured pace of the narration required a more leisurelyapproach to acquire less information, since Qwiki is too new tooffer truly encyclopedic depth on many topics. But I became so lostin the "story," I hardly noticed the minutes ticking by.
That is, until I got to this part: " . . . coupled with internaland political stability . . . "
The text was obviously pulled before Jan. 25, 2011. UnlikeWikipedia, Qwiki does not yet have a diligent army of editors. Thequality and amount of information could - and should - change asthe site becomes more curated, both by Qwiki staff and from itsaudience.
There are other potentially nifty uses for the Qwiki searchengine.
Imbruce said he hopes to have a phone application that will pullpersonal information from your calendar and wake you with the time,the weather, upcoming events in your life and the news of yourchoosing.
Another possibility: interactive personalized Qwiki pages withshort films about your life, creating by culling information yourequest from Facebook, YouTube and other sources.
Time will tell if Qwiki's promise will be fulfilled. But eventhough the Qwiki vision of our Internet future hasn't come fullyinto focus, what's visible so far is pretty appealing.
bellm@washpost.com
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