Wolfram Alpha is not a Google killer!
Wolfram Alpha is not a Wikipedia killer!
Wolfram Alpha does not want to dismember any company and bathe itself in its blood!

Please ignore unimaginative claims made by linkbait authors. Let’s forget the 1999’s prehistoric “me kill” mentality and focus instead on more peaceful opportunities. We now live in the age of mash-ups, so here’s my modest proposal for symbiosis between Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia.

The opportunity for symbiosis comes from their different strengths. Wolfram Alpha’s FAQ section gives a very clear description of how it compares to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia gives you pages of narrative about topics. Wolfram|Alpha computes answers to specific questions you ask, just giving facts, not narrative. Wolfram|Alpha often includes sidebar links to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia describes a concept; Wolfram Alpha gives you the ability to try out that concept in practice.

And because everything needs a car analogy…
Wikipedia is like a car magazine and Wolfram Alpha is like a car simulator. You can open a magazine and read more about a car you just took for a virtual test drive, or start with the magazine and go for a ride in a car you just read about.

You can see in the above quote that one-way links from Wolfram Alpha to Wikipedia already exist. What’s still missing are connections from Wikipedia to Wolfram Alpha, which might one day look like this:

A hypothetical Wolfram Alpha / Wikipedia mash-up. Click for full size.

There you have it. Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia can not olny coexist peacefully, they can help each other. No need to argue about who is going to kill who.

I don’t know. Am I the only one finding it difficult to get excited about this?

But here’s something I could get mildly excited about: an API which would allow any site to store files on your web drive the same way apps on your computer can store files on your local hard drive, as scientifically illustrated by the following image:

This way your favorite services could write copies of your data to the webdrive location you provided. Not only would this allow you to seamlessly use files between any desktop and web applications, it would also mean that when another successful and popular web startup went out of business because their cunning business plan didn’t include making money, you wouldn’t need to worry because you’d know that you have a copy of your data safely stored on servers of a company which only occasionaly loses their user’s emails.

And finally, some sort-of related reading which talks about completely self-hosting clones of popular web apps, as opposed to only having separate storage for data, described above:

• Moving Towards A Self-Hosted Cloud