What's with the Wolfram|Alpha Control Room?

2009-05-18

There’s no doubt about it, the launch of Wolfram|Alpha has been truly strange.

There’s the technology itself. All answers get rendered as images, even when they don’t need to be. It doesn’t handle obvious errors very well.

They oddly chose to launch on Friday night, a time when even the majority of Battlestar Galactica fans opted to use their DVRs and go out. And they’ve fed a media hype machine to levels that they cannot possibly live up to.

But the weirdest thing about Wolfram|Alpha is that they have a control room, like NASA, or like the villains from 24. Nerds hunch over their laptops in stadium style seating, with huge monitors and projected images on a big wall in front of them. Apparently, launching a web app is serious business. They even have a live web feed, which primarily broadcasts video of some guy standing at the back of the room scratching himself.

So, if you think this is all incredibly surreal like I do, I invite you to take any of the above images, download Comic Life, and have some fun. Here’s my stab at it: