@answerme turns Twitter into a Q&A site. You go to atanswerme.com to see the questions, and you answer by entering @answerme @username this is an answer.
Here's how it works:
@answerme is a little tool to help you track questions you ask on Twitter. Imagine Yahoo! Answers lite built on Twitter and you've got a good idea of what we're doin' here.
Innovative uses of Twitter just keep coming. Just what I needed-- something to make me use Twitter even more. Follow @answerme.
I made a killing in an Inkling prediction market this past weekend when the MicroHoo talks went down the tubes: Will Microsoft announce a successful buyout of Yahoo! in 2008?. I started shorting the deal last week at $84, and just kept buying all the way down.
I have no idea how the corporate world works, and how you are supposed to consummate these sorts of deals. For all I know it's against the law to talk to the buy-out target before the fact. Regardless, I think the whole notion is stupid. Think how much better this would have gone in a transparent world? Where Steve sends Jerry an email, or even better-- a tweet, and says, "Can we talk? I want to share an idea we've had with you." Then they get together over a beer, "discover" that they have pretty different cultures, that there are significant barriers, and that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.
Maybe things just aren't done that way in business-- how would I know? We don't deal in numbers that big in academia. I do know that a little transparency might have led to a whole lot more trust, and if the deal couldn't be made at least they wouldn't be facing such a brutal and very public failure.
Regardless, their failure catapulted me into the top 100 traders at Inkling, and on to the leader-board for the week. And for that I am thankful!
As you know I have quite a bit of interest in Question and Answer sites. This new research coming out of the University of Minnesota caught my attention: U of M study finds you get what you pay for with online Q & A sites
Surprisingly the Web site Yahoo! Answers, which provides answers for free, performed as well as Google Answers when the fee was low ($3) and outperformed reference librarians and an "ask-an-expert" site. Researchers attributed this success to the large online community that contributes to that site's answers.
If you can sift through the noise on Yahoo Answers you can find some good information. I find it interesting that the most successful site, if you paid enough money, was the discontinued Google Answers (which lives on at Uclue). Seems to me that the take-away from this research is that unless you're paying people pretty well to do some in-depth research to answer a question, the next best thing is to make sure that lots of people are involved in vetting the answers.
Hitwise intelligence on the growth of Q&A sites, and Yahoo's continuing domimance-- Question & Answer Site Visits Up 118%, Yahoo Answers Is Clear Leader:
The market share of US visits to Question and Answer websites for the week ended March 15 was 118% more than during the equivalent week in 2007 - and over the past two years US visits to the category have increased 889% (Feb. ‘08 vs. Feb. ‘06), Hitwise said.
I've fooled around at Yahoo Answers asking serious questions and have yet to be satisfied with an answer. Most of what you see there are trivial questions. The site feels much more like Twitter than Wikipedia. This is not to say that Twitter is trivial, as it certainly is not, and I'm not saying that Yahoo Answers is trivial either. It's just that it doesn't work so well for getting quality answers to serious questions. This is an example of the type of question you'll see there, "Things you should never say to a police man?"
The reason that people use Yahoo Answers is more for connecting with other people and entertainment than answers to serious questions. Others, like Google, have tried to enter this space and have failed miserably. Where Yahoo is dominant right now, there's still plenty of opportunity for someone to enter into the Q&A game and do it right. Who will it be?
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