At first glance, iWise is “Twitter for dead people,” says founder and CEO Edo Segal. You can find nuggets of wisdom from famous people about anything—love, change, happiness, truth. Then you can follow those people in your own “Wisdom Tree,” which is a feed of quotes from the people you follow. In my Wisdom Tree, for instance, I’m following Benjamin Franklin, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, the Dalai Lama, and Jim Morrison.
There is some integration with Twitter itself in that you can sign in using your Twitter account and Tweet out any particularly good quotes you want to share. When you search for a quote about a particular topic, iWise shows you results both from the quotes it indexes off the Web and Twitter. The results are presented in a flowing real-time stream, to give them a feeling of immediacy. You can also receive quotes in your Twitter feed once a day, but only as a private direct message. And there is even a free iPhone app (iTunes link), designed to give you a little bit of wisdom every day.
The Twitter-like experience is designed as an entry point for the service, but Segal has much bigger ambitions for iWise. The mission statement is a slight tweak on Google’s: “To organize the world’s wisdom and make it universally accessible.” Segal was the founder of Relegence, a real-time search engine which he sold to AOL a few years ago (and he was on our real time search panel at our CrunchUp a couple weeks ago). He now runs Futurity Ventures, and iWise is one of the first projects to come out of it.
Underlying iWise is a semantic search engine which makes it easy to find quotes on any topic. It searches Wikiquote and other sources, and organizes quotes by author and topic. Every search also generates a Twitter feed on the same topic, so you can compare the wisdom of the past with the, um, wisdom of the present.
Wisdom is acquired over several lifetimes,” says Segal, which is why he created iWise to make wisdom more accessible. Each quote links to its own URL on iWise, where related wisdom/quotes can be explored. When you Tweet out a quote, the iWise short link takes people back to this page. (You can also order coffee mugs and mouse pads with any quote printed on it via Zazzle).
iWise members can also create their own pearls of wisdom, and check to see if it is truly original. If it is, then you get your own iWise page for that quote with a timestamp for when you came up with it. You can Tweet this out to your friends as well. I came up with “Truthfullness helps prevent toothlessness.”
A quote is a dense form of information, which can lead to other deeper types of exploration. Segal sees the passing and discovery of quotes as a form of micro-education, and famous quotes is just a starting point for him. He truly wants to organize all wisdom on the web. He’s opened up an API to his semantic search engine which other developers can use to add some wisdom to their services.
Kinda cool.
Techcrunch should reverse the posting order of comments so that the most recent show up at the top. Check out TED.
It’s more fun. It democratizes commenting. Everybody gets a little airtime. The way it is now, on highly commented blogs, the first comments get all the attention and the end comments get no attention. It’s like going to the cafeteria and the first guy gets all the food while the rest just get to watch.
On low commented blogs it’s not relevant. On highly commented blogs it’s clearly a violation of the Commenter Bill of Rights.
Send them an email. Make a petition too! I’ll sign it!
i guess it wasn’t free
Love it !
It’s a great idea. Just a bit peeved about the “i” part of “iWise”.
If any Extraterrestrial are able to connect to the Internet they must laught their socks off at how dumb humans are.
People should realise that when their only business idea comes from copying another business then they should stay out of business.
that’s right. just like facebook copying myspace, and google copying alta-vista
LOL.
Pwned.
Um, the Dalai Lama isn’t dead.
Nicely executed and worth a look. More than just another “built on Twitter” webapp.
I kinda like getting quotes myself…digging for them by doing something revolutionary…like reading a book.
Still it is cool to know, i could decide to quit such oldtimey antics and load iwise…..
Bob Dylan (the first person who I see and follow) also is alive. So it isn’t Twitter for dead people…
I believe Philip Greenspun, Edo Segal, and George Costanza are actually all the same person.
Cool.
It’s emphasize my idea regarding Twitter’s future place in the web.
As I see it, within 1-2 years, Twitter will be in the same place where ICQ and Hotmail are today, meaning it will regarded as the genuine service, but only one of many others.
Twitter invented a concept, but now it’s the time for many other realtime stream services to evolve and get their share. (well, maybe realtime is not the best description for iWise, but whatever…)
Blip.fm already do that, and now iWise, and soon we’ll see many of those twitter like services getting more and more attention.
There’s nothing that special with Twitter that justifies it to be the eternal king of the “Status-updates” kingdom, much the same as there’s no logic of having single Email or Instant Messaging service.
People like variety, and it will happen eventually.
Alot of ppl are trying to duplicate Twitter, but it just ain’t happening ..LOL
Cool website…Im loving it
Pretty sure if you show up on twitter, chances are you are probably dead. Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, Jeff Gold… oh, wait.. he’s still alive… I guess I don’t see the need for iWise as I already have Twitter…
I’ll tell you what, the name of this article was kind of freaky. (I was hoping I could talk to Hendrix, lol)
Anyway, if this happens to start going somewhere I wonder if Google will try to buy it…
Interesting. Part of me thinks this is cool. The other part needs to get in there and check cited sources and quote attribution. Half the things that people supposedly said are either misquoted or poorly attributed – as a librarian, I spend a lot of time tracking the ACTUAL TRUTH of what people supposedly said or did not say (don’t even get me started on the Robert Frost quote that took two months to solve, and it turned out Frost never even said it).
I guess you could argue that nobody cares, it doesn’t matter, etc. I say, if you’re gonna put the world’s wisdom on the internet, better do due diligence and make sure you’ve actually got the wisdom….
Just to clarify: I was speaking above in general about people’s tendency to repeat quotes on the internet without proper attribution. I have not yet had a chance to play with this particular service and test its accuracy.
you know you have no legacy when you have to write it yourself…
such caca… you’re going to let others write it for you? If I google your name, think I’m only going to find good stuff, if I find anything at all?
Checked out iWise.Great Idea.Nice way to organize wisdom together
Wow, I bet this will make its owners very, very rich. /sarcasm
If someone said it 100 years ago and the quote has “survived” chances are it is more interesting/profound than what your “Facebook Friends/social graph” have to say.
So there, Mr Zuckerman! Hah!
Best,
R
don’t like the “i” in “iWise” but I think it’s pretty funny it is being referred to as twitter for dead people.
Nothing like stating the obvious. Twitter is for dead people.
LOL!
A quotes search engine? Must be a slow day on TechCrunch
I tried it and i loved it. I got a window to showcase my own quotes which i hold close to my heart, and it gives you such joy when you realize people are liking them and following them. I recommend everyone to see it it
Nice cool website.I must say its a cool idea.Atleaset different from other quote websites.
Wow!!! cool website. Guys checkout the gift it and download feature. Super Cool…
Love the iPhone app as well.
Edo’s thinking has always been light years ahead of everybody.
True creative mind.
I’m not sure reducing the words of famous people to sound bites conveys much real wisdom.
Plus iWise has one of the most annoying home pages I have ever seen. Pop-up videos, Twitter-like message streams, rotating banners — scary. I also hate how it sends a tweet (without your permission) telling all your followers that you signed up for the site. Uncool.
It also seems like the content of the site is somewhat suspect. The article above says they pull some of their content from Wikiquote, which is notoriously inaccurate. There doesn’t seem to be any attribution given for the quotations on iWise either, which is the main problem with most quotation sites out there.
For example, the Mark Twain feed includes the quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Mark Twain never wrote or said that, but iWise is perpetuating the misinformation that he did.
Or take Arthur C. Clarke’s quote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” iWise lists 3 or 4 variations of this quote, all attributed to Clarke, like, “Any sufficiently retarded magic is indistinguishable from technology.” But those variations were said by other people, in response to Clarke. iWise pulled them from the “Commentary about…” section of Clarke’s Wikiquote page and attributed them all to Clarke.
Having said all that, iWise’s technology is impressive, as is the quantity of information on the site. It is definitely a strong achievement. But I think I’ll wait until they clean up their database a bit before using it much.
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