Although we’re not yet convinced that Wolfram Alpha is going to be the search company to finally challenge Google, this launch strategy is a smart one – if all goes well. With Justin.tv’s integration of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace into the chat window that accompanies each video, the launch stands to gain a tremendous amount of buzz across social media sites.
The Wolfram Alpha team tries to manage expectations in a blog post about the event, writing, “We can’t guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Indeed, we fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that you’ll find it interesting to join us as we work through these in real time. Perhaps you’ll even have some advice to share.” Once the webcast is completed, the company expects to push what it calls a computation knowledge engine out to everyone “within an hour or two.”
While Wolfram Alpha is patting their own back a bit for their very public launch (“we’ve been rather surprised that we haven’t been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all,” they write), other companies hoping to duplicate this strategy should note that the search engine is one of the most hyped new products this year, so attracting tons of viewers to your own webcast launch might not be so easy (assuming Wolfram Alpha’s assumption is right and people will watch a website launch on a Friday night).