@adreamofautumn I agree with you… we will have options as a result. Thank you to all responses. I essentially wanted to get a sense of how people use and think they use Fluther, and what it means to them. Wolfram Alpha will not replace what Fluther is… my motivation for the question was Fluther’s catch phrase at the top of the page: “everybody is an expert at something” ... since we don’t exactly know what Alpha will offer (how deep the complexity of the knowledge base is), it will be hard to tell which “expert” knowledge at Fluther will be covered by Alpha.
I think there is something valuable in receiving expert knowledge through human interaction… there is almost a built-in “grain-of-salt”, creativity process that occurs that will certainly not be a part of Alpha, that is an attractive quality of Fluther.
I’ve always found it interesting that questions such as “What is the average annual rainfall in Seattle?” are uncommon on Fluther… and these are the type of questions that Alpha will (apparently) answer. So, what is the scope of the expert knowledge that Fluther encourages? Is it philosophical? Or…?
I guess the answer to these questions… are implicitly answered by our discussion here…