I’m amazed by a new computational search engine that was launch over the weekend called Wolfram|Alpha. It semantically analyzes search terms and returns interesting computated results.
To give you a sense what’s impressive about Wolfram|Alpha, I’ve listed a sampling of searches and their corresponding results below. You can also watch this introduction video from Stephen Wolfram himself to get a good idea on this search engine.
I’m so enamored by Wolfram|Alpha that I’ve installed a firefox addon that adds Wolfram|Alpha results to Google search results. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12006.
Mashable has a nice collection of Wolfram|Alpha easter eggs. Buzzfeed found that it knows superheroes’ secret identities. Meanwhile, folks on Friendfeed has come up with some really zany searches like: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?, how many peppers did peter piper pick? and why is the sky blue?
Name search
Genealogic relation Search
City Search
Date Search comparison with Google 
Miscellaneous
friendfeed
On Friendfeed, I noticed is that often a theme bubbles up and people start to share links and pictures with that theme during a particular day. This happened recently with pictures of Ronald McDonald. I find this mix of zany along with the informative tech news and social media commentary is what makes friendfeed fun, social, and addictive.
In the past month, I’ve seen fun links around Bacon, Legos, and Darth Vader. I wonder what will be the theme tomorrow?
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friendfeed
A quick way to share the current page that you’re browsing on friendfeed is to use the friendfeed bookmarklet. Make sure to watch the video to see how to share sites along with pictures.
An issue I have with the bookmarklet is that I need to display the bookmarks toolbar in order to have a place to hold the bookmarklet. Ideally, I want to keep the browser chrome at a minimum. But unfortunately, you can’t just drag the bookmarklet like a button into the toolbar; it needs to reside in the bookmarks toolbar.
Here’s how I was able to add it to the left of the address bar.
- Drag the Share on FriendFeed bookmarklet to the bookmarks toolbar
- Delete the default bookmarks.
- Right-click on an unused area in the toolbar and select customize
- Move the Bookmarks toolbar to the left of the address bar and select done.
- Right-click on an unused area in the toolbar again and uncheck bookmarks toolbar
- I renamed the bookmark to simply “FF”
One thing that I would like to do is change the Icon to use the Friendfeed ico file and remove the text. That’s something that I’ll explore.
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friendfeed
