I got my alpha invite for Qwiki today and decided to try it out for real to see what all the hype was about. As it happens the Creative Director Rasmus Knutsson is an acquaintance, and has been involved with the project from the start. Qwiki is a service which aims to quickly give you a birds eye overview of a topic of your choice. You enter a city, famous person, company or anything else that you can think of (Qwiki helpfully displays a drop down list as you type, which means you can quickly find what you’re looking for).
This is when it gets good. You can just kick back and watch a presentation generated on-the-fly about the subject. The data for the two or so million topics is coming from Wikipedia articles and is mixed with infographics and images.
The voice which reads out the text is actually pretty good, and only occasionally slips up. I would however have preferred an open standards version of the site instead of relying on Flash. I guess you can’t get everything — bummer.
It’s hard to know where Qwiki is going. There’s plenty of ways it could (and most probably will) be improved, but seeing as it is an alpha release that is to be expected. If it was me, I’d be aiming for the mobile platforms first. It just feels like one of those things that would be excellent on your phone, trying to prove a few mates wrong at the pub.
My gut feeling is that I like it.