Finally I received my invitation for the Powerset’s Powerlabs website. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of weeks now and I’m quite impress with some of the things they’ve accomplished. Powerlabs is an invitation only community for beta testers, built around five demos (they just added a new one yesterday). Their main goal is to show Powerset’s technology (via the demos), and to discuss problems, questions or ideas related to either the technology or the web interface.
The web site has five main sections: Dashboard (like you home page), Demos, Discussions, Queries (wished-for queries by other members) and People (list and ranking of current members). You can basically break the website in two big sections, the demos and the discussion area (more on this later).
Dashboard
This section is the user’s homepage for Powerlabs. As you can see on the screenshot, here you can monitor your stats within the community (nº of discussions, nº of comments, global rank based on karma points, etc.), Powerlabs latest news (“New Sports Demo” right now), a list of recently implemented ideas (with a link to the post where the idea was made and the author) and your news feed. The news feed is probably one of the best parts of Powerlabs. It’s quite similar to the one you find in Facebook and it basically keeps you updated with the latest activities related to your user and you summited ideas.
Demos
This is one of the most important areas of the website. Here you can play with five demos that show you Powerset’s technology at work. I stress the word technology, because you won’t find a Natural Language Search demo here. So it’s not a demo of the product, it’s a demo of the algorithms they are using to build the product. The demos have two big restrictions, they use predefined queries (you are just able to fill some words of a longer phrase) and they only work with the Wikipedia corpus (hopefully it seems they are trying to expand the corpus in a very near future). The demos are divided in several categories: sports, the arts, business, quotes and PowerMouse. The first four are the same demo, the only difference is on the queries you can ask.
For example, for the sports demo you can ask some of the following questions:
- What did X win?
- What did X draft?
- Who X (defeated or beat) X?
For the business demo, you can ask things like:
- What does X own?
- Who did X acquire?
The PowerMouse demo is probably the most fun to play with, it lets “you examine how structured information is extracted from open text“. As they say, it’s not a search application per se, but it’s a window into how the results are obtained. When you start the demo you are asked to fill the following structure: Something (subject) – Connection (verb) – Something (object). There are no restrictions on what three words to use. This demo will give you all the possible combinations of your query. When it can’t find the exact query it will use broader words to try and get what you where looking for. Take a look at the screenshot for more insights.
Discussions
This is the heart of the website. The discussion area is like a forum but on steroids. It’s divided in various categories (wikipedia, query examples, labs, the arts, …). You also have a category where you’ll see all the posts either order by date or by relevancy. Each post has it’s title, author, nº of views, votes and comments. It works in a similar way as Digg does. Members read a post and vote if the like the idea. The more number of votes an idea gets, the higher it gets on the relevancy list. For each post you can also set a flag that will allow you to follow the activity (you’ll get updates on your news feed). Each time a comment or an idea you’ve posted gets a vote, you’ll get a new entry on your news feed. Every time someone comments on either a comment you made or an idea you sent, you’ll get an entry on your news feed. There is even a RSS feed for the discussions, albeit the url is hidden in one of the posts. One of the coolest features is that, before post something, the system suggest similar already summited ideas. If by any chance someone has already posted a similar question or idea, you’ll know before you actually send yours, avoiding sending duplicated post.
Queries
This section lets you browse some of the member’s wished-for queries. It lets you create new queries and comment on the ones that are stored already.
People
The site spins around the idea of karma points. That’s similar to many other ranking/voting systems around like Slashdot, Digg or ycnews. You earn points for commenting, for using the demos, for posting an idea and for every vote your ideas or comments get. The People‘s area lets you monitor what members are on the system. You can order them by karma rank, recent activity, number of ideas, etc. In the future some demos will require a certain level of karma, so it’s always important to reach a good karma level.
My opinions? Well, I think Powerset has achieved a great goal, get lots of testers involved. It’s true that the demos disappoint, I think most people expect a less rigid demo, but hey, at least they are showing that the technology isn’t vaporware. I love the approach of letting people participate at all stages of the product development. Few companies do that and it’s a breath of fresh air. The interface and user experience of Powerlabs is awesome. One of the best I’ve seen so far. It’s easy, straightforward and useful. Importing the voting scheme from places like Digg is a very smart move, they’ve managed to engage a lot of users and that’s great. The downside, after playing for some weeks and due to the lack of more comprehensive questions and corpuses, you end up not knowing what more to do. In my opinion, it lacks three important things, an RSS feed for the news feed, that way you can keep updated instead of having to refresh the browser, a way to ask much more open questions and a bigger and updated corpus (I think this might be on its way). Nevertheless, they are moving fast and each week they are adding new features, so I’ll keep checking and I’ll update when necessary.
Any Powerseters willing to add some comments?
Image credits: Powerset