Amazon Launches Answers Service Beta

Fennec writes "Amazon.com has launched a beta of a new service called Askville, yet another online answers service, flavored with "Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins." These coins will supposedly become useful some day on another Amazon service that's not actually open yet, Questville. If this virtual currency becomes useful, could Askville fill a place between strictly volunteer systems and pay-for-answer services like the now-defunct Google Answers? Or is it destined to fail in the already-saturated online Q&A market?"

Comments

Here's a question

[TodMinuit]

Has anyone actually used one of these services for a real inquiry?

Re:Here's a question

[Dunbal]

Has anyone actually used one of these services for a real inquiry?


YES

      That will be $15.95 please.

Re:Here's a question

[Psycosys]

Why bother with one of these services when I can just Ask Slashdot for free?

Re:Here's a question

[laejoh]

As I already know the answer (42) but am not sure about the question...

NO

Re:Here's a question

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative. Do you accept sexual favors as payment?

Re:Here's a question

[mrvan]

Ask Slashdot! The only place that moderates obvious irony as 'insightful'!

Re:Here's a question

[Dunbal]

Do you accept sexual favors as payment?


      YES

      Here is a large cucumber and a tube of K.Y. lube. Begin. I shall watch.

Re:Here's a question

[tinkertim]

Why bother with one of these services when I can just Ask Slashdot for free?

I suppose you're free to chose. Which would you like flogged more, your ass or your AMEX?

Re:Here's a question

[Hijacked Public]

I paid $5!

Re:Here's a question

[aplusjimages]

I've used Yahoo! Answers quite a bit. Unfortunately its become more of an area to bash other peoples politics, religion, or sexual orientation, but every once in a while you'll get some serious questions and some serious answers.

Re:Here's a question

[FooAtWFU]

You can actually ask a question on Amazon's service for free, as well. Amazon is the group "paying" for the answers. I suppose they hope to gain from it by people recommending books and other things they sell (they have a field where you can recommend Amazon products along with the answers).

Re:Here's a question

[UbuntuDupe]

More like:

YES

That will be $0 please.

*one week later*

"Hey, why the fuck did Amazon just bill my credit card $15.95?"

Re:Here's a question

[jfengel]

Yeah, actually. I wanted to know the proper names of the tragedy/comedy masks. It seemed that they should have a proper Greek name.

It turns out that they don't, and that's why no amount of Googling found an answer. Sometimes you just have to ask an expert. It was worth five bucks to me.

Re:Here's a question

[Vulva R. Thompson, P]

Agreed, especially because on Slashdot you can ask a legal question and get advice from non-lawyers.

Try doing that with Askville!

Re:Here's a question

[HappyEngineer]

Before it closed down, I used google answers all the time. Sometimes my questions went unanswered. Sometimes I got excellent answers. The most useful answers I got involved math and science. I needed to create a recommendations engine for products and didn't know where to go to find out how to do it. So, I asked at google answers and got enough information to actually be able to implement it. (and it has long worked quite well) I ended up paying $30 plus a $20 tip, but it was well worth it.

When google answers closed down I went to yahoo answers and was severely disappointed. The quality of the answers there is markedly lower than the answers were at google. Google had a team of a few hundred people answering questions. Yahoo lets anyone answer. That'd be ok if good people answered, but most questions I asked got terrible answers.

For instance, I asked about finding software to capture video from my video camera. The first and only answer I got simply told me to go to Best Buy and ask the people there. Pfft!

Here's an excellent example of the type of answer I get at yahoo answers. I asked about whether it'd be possible to genetically engineer plants so they could survive on mars. One of the answers was: "Did you ever think that if we alter another planet it may have a bad reaction in space and throw all the other planets and stuff out of orbit. Remember some things are the way they are for a good reason!!"

This sounds more like a game...

[Yoozer]

This sounds more like a game than an actual useful search engine.

On the other hand, having services like this and virtual cash in several games, maybe it's time to propose some kind of uniform standard instead of getting a huge selection of virtual currency (which will happen anyway because lots of different standards for the same are fun). Exchange Quest Coins against Warcraft Gold so you can finally buy that weapon, sell off your character and use the profit to buy Wii points so you can get more virtual console games, in the meantime paying a percentage to whatever virtual bank pops up in Second Life or so. Just great.

How is this different?

[kraemate]

What is the fundamental difference between this and Google's failed attempt? To me, Google answers seemed pretty neat but obviously out of place. What has amazon got that'll turn things around and fill the gap? Won't Amazon suffer from the fact that it is primarily an e-commerce website?

Re:How is this different?

[kevin_conaway]

What is the fundamental difference between this and Google's failed attempt? To me, Google answers seemed pretty neat but obviously out of place. What has amazon got that'll turn things around and fill the gap? Won't Amazon suffer from the fact that it is primarily an e-commerce website?

I'd guess that they have something useful that you can spend your "points" on. Imagine if you were able to put these "coins" towards an Amazon gift certificate

Re:How is this different?

[Keeper Of Keys]

In its favour, Amazon is already a repository of fairly trustworthy opinion. But I'm not sure how it thinks the virtual money scenario will help it succeed where Google failed.

People expect to find the answer to their question for free on the internet, and this is in the main a not unrealistic expectation. The more savvy user will - when Googling draws a blank - post a question on a relevant forum, where - again, in the main - it will be answered. For free. Thus, this kind of operation is doomed, as it only appeals to the frustrated novice user (who probably also has a high expectation of getting the answer for free, they just don't know how, so will be reluctant to pay) and people in a hurry.

Exactly...

[Psycosys]

How many Quest coins are you offering for an answer to this question?

45 Quest points awarded

[weinrich]

45 Quest points awarded for providing the Accepted Answer. Points go to Ogre_KLR, a level 5 Mage with +14 HP and a penchant for scrolls of invisibility.

Re:45 Quest points awarded

[bad_fx]

Spotted on Askville, from Eric:

Q - What are the main weaknesses of a Gazebo?

Re:45 Quest points awarded

[Bloke down the pub]

What are the main weaknesses of a Gazebo?

It can only cure a disease if the patient believes it will.

Re:45 Quest points awarded

[hjo3]

If I remember correctly, a Bouncing Betty Fireball.

Re:45 Quest points awarded

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you'll find that's a placenta...

They wont give you anything interesting

[192939495969798999]

Yahoo Answers has long preported to offer rewards for answering questions, but so far the only rewards I've seen are a bumper sticker and a keychain, and both are awarded to any idiot who answers more than a (very low) set number of questions. Basically, they want to generate free traffic and advertising revenue. I wouldn't use the service unless they were paying cash money, but then of course it would just go away, because as Google found out, not that many people are willing to put up cash for an answer.

Re:They wont give you anything interesting

[iknowcss]

People aren't willing to pay money for an answer over the internet. They know what they're looking for is there for free anyways, why should they pay more to have some geek tell them? I know the obvious answer is "it's a service you pay for", but that mentality doesn't seem to trickle down to the subset of Internet users that would actually benefit from this service.

Online Q&A sites are inherently flawed in their design. Unless someone comes up with a more unique (possibly more human?) method, no one will be truly willing to spend their money on Teh Intarwebz.

Quantify

[kraemate]

I believe that the real problem lies in the fact that it is in general quite difficult to quantify the value of information. There have been always two extremes in the whole information seeking approach: either it's free, or you have to pay tons of cash to some agency/consulting firm/ the guy on the street who knows all about the crooks as shown in the movies. People in general find it quite difficult to go for the middle ground in this case. They either expect it free, or are so desperate that they'll shell out anything.

Not so simple

[mattcasters]

You would have to force the authors/admins of the different virtual worlds to not distribute unlimted amounts of the virtual currencies.
Otherwise like, in the real world, this would lead to enormous devaluations in other worlds.

Suppose you did want to buy that weapon and all of a sudden there is this other game where you can get at the required funds very easily.
It would seriously take out all the fun out of the games don't you think?

In short, if you're going with a single currency, there would have to be a single "bank" that issues the currency at the least and strangly limited amounts of the currency would have to be allowed to be available. Somehow, I don't see this happen just yet.

Re:Not so simple

[tomhudson]

"You would have to force the authors/admins of the different virtual worlds to not distribute unlimted amounts of the virtual currencies. Otherwise like, in the real world, this would lead to enormous devaluations in other worlds."

You mean like Lindon Dollars in The Ponzi Scam Otherwise Known As Second Life?

Re:Not so simple

[charlieman]

Then what about an interchange currency, so every game keeps their local currency and have some indicator for changing the money...

Re:Not so simple

[yada21]

Gold, it has intrinsic value. That's what I tell everyone on my vastly popular speaking tours.

Re:Not so simple

[UbuntuDupe]

Currently, central banks are trusted not to inflate their currencies to nothing, without being forced. In fact, this trust is quite strong. The Chinese government has invested a significant amount of revenues in long-term, low-yield U.S. government bonds, even though inflation slightly higher than historical averages would completely screw them over.

Unlike fiat currencies, however, Linden Dollars *are* redeemable on demand for certain goods, at least from what I remember when I played. Specifically, to teleport, rent land, bring an item into the world, or take a screenshot, you have to pay LD's. You don't just use them for buying from other players. So if Linden Labs did inflate its currency, it would have to "back" that inflation with increased capacity for storing in-game items.

In contrast, the guarantor of Federal Reserve notes (US Dollars) has long since suspended any promise that you can redeem goods from it on demand.

Re:Not so simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The one big thing that you can be guaranteed to use your dollars for is to pay taxes.

Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins

[Denial93]

Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins or other virtual status rewards make sense. If we learned anything from WoW, it is that such things motivate people to spend time, and even money. But it would be more beneficial to start to give virtual brownie points to editors of the wikipedia, whose help can aid millions, rather than this commercial venture where answers will probably be read by relatively few. On the wiki, a status-based editor rating system that does not grant effective privilege could solve a lot of problems.

I have elaborated on that elsewhere.

Re:Experience Points, Levels, and Quest Coins

[h2g2bob]

Wikipedia has its own reference desk where you can ask questions. It's volunteer based and the quality of the answers varies greatly. The idea is to have virtual librarians pointing people to places which can answer more properly, but often the questions are simply answered.

Sounds OK

[Psychotria]

In theory, I cannot flaw this decision. If the reply/feedback must be from a person who has purchased the book, then this would immediately rule out many variables. Even better would be if Amazon sent a free copy of the book (to persons whose profile indicates they are interested in the subject) with the proviso that they must provide feedback. There could be a checklist that people responding must follow, and if the response does not meet certain Performance Indicators, then the cost of the book will no longer be waived. If the system was well documented and the waivers clear and ambiguous, then I'd participate without hesistation.

On old fogey writes

[maroberts]

Bring back newsgroups, I tell ya!

I remember t' day when you could ask a stupid question on a newsgroup and get at least 5 answers for free, and all you had to do was decide which 4 were wrong. Now you have to pay (virtually or not) for the privilege...

plus ca change,....

Re:On old fogey writes

[djh101010]

Bring back newsgroups, I tell ya!

I remember t' day when you could ask a stupid question on a newsgroup and get at least 5 answers for free, and all you had to do was decide which 4 were wrong. Now you have to pay (virtually or not) for the privilege...
So, usenet is dead now? I didn't see the posting saying so. Actually I subscribe to news.individual.net for 10 Euro a year, and they provide excellent speed, retention, and spam filtering. No binaries groups though.

Yet another defunction answersite^2 (Yada Yada)

[mattr]

FWIW there was a similar answers thing on The Source IIRC which was the forerunner of niftyserve etc. That failed too. Google or Amazon would do far better to leave answering to the experts and take a cut from introducing a consulting firm, prof or author who knows his/her stuff. Put it this way, if there is something you need to know and it is worth paying money for it, wouldn't you go to an expert? Nothing Amazon or Google say indicates they can do more than search the web like you (unless you want to know about online selling or computational linguistics maybe). If google indexes businesses and human resources the way it does websites they might have something though.

How does this differ from NowNow?

[DZR]

Amazon now have two question answering services? Because NowNow is also by Amazon. Why would they start two such similar services?

Questville?

[flaknugget]

So does anyone know what this Questville thing-ama-bobber is?

Sounds like fun.

My question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll ask it here for obvious reasons:

Amazons main site works fine without javascript, did they outsource askville or hand it to some 16y/o AJAX-frothing intern?

 

yeah right...

[fattmatt]

it's gonna end up wikified ... a pile of misinformed $hithe@ds all believing each other bullshit and patting each other on the back ... whilst redeeming coins for crappy refurbished electronics on Amazon.

Semantic Web

[Catil]

Or is it destined to fail in the already-saturated online Q&A market? It may be saturated, but there still isn't a clear market-leader and that doesn't suprise me. People have quickly learned to use the omniscient Google/Wikipedia combination to find answers and I don't think that any Q&A service could compete as there is simply no gap at the moment. For example, if you want to know who Mozart was, then you could perhaps ask any Q&A service and eventually get a short answer, but you probably want to know more about him and about the music he did and maybe about other musicians of his time and so on, and that's where those services start to malfunction. That is mainly because you are still sitting at your desk and have the time to figure out stuff yourself

In the future, however, where the majority will be connected to the internet through mobile devices all the time and you just shout any question in your tiny headset and expect to get a short answer by a nice synthetical female voice, those services could become interesting (if they manage grow a large enough database by then). The only problem is that at this time the Semantic Web will probably have gone off and some AI using the old Google/Wikipedia combination for you, will summarize the same answer just as quickly and with an even nicer synthetical female voice, drawing Q&A services redundant.

Answering a Question

[hhawk]

I just answered a question...

How it worked:
#1 I have an amazon account so I was able to log right it (I like that)
#2 It was hard finding a question that I would actually answer since the high level questions are very broad and I was lookig for a question I really know and understand.
#3 I answered the question
#4 I was asked to LINK web pages, Amazon Merch or a video to my answer
#5 I got a gold coin
#6 I saw other answers to the same question

(see my reply to this question where I will detail my thoughts about the service)

Re :Answering a Question

[hhawk]

So what did I think of the service..

There were some very strange questions in there like "how much would you pay for a Quantum Computer." Some were very detailed like questions about some error condition during a driver installation..

The real question is the value of the answers. I put in my answer and I was able to see what else had been suggested. The question I answered, asked about uploading video from a cell phone to a computer. I took a direct approach and suggested a data cable and then link in some example cables from the Amazon store.

Other people, who answered the same question, detailed how you could upload the video to a web site and then download it to the computer in question.

What you end up with here is a mini "Delphi" study.. [Which is a technique a method of generating ideas and facilitating consensus among individuals" with "expert" knowledge of some topic. You ask a bunch of java programmers how long would it take to program X and the average of the answer is supposed to be better than any one answer.]

I thought my own answer was good because it accurately answered the question. but my answer would require the person to go buy something new, hook it up, etc. The other answers certainly would be something they could do "right now" without any expense.

What I think is good here is that the person who asked the questions will see a range of answers and they can decide which of any of them to follow.

Re:Re :Answering a Question

[hhawk]

I've been trying out the service all day.. I've posted a few questions and asked some as well.. I've voted on others people answers also...

What does that all mean?

* You get a "gold coin" for everything you do (ask, answer, vote, etc.)
* They accept 5 answers for each question
* Each person who answers, gets to vote on the other answers (letting your experience and ego get in the way of what others might say..)
* Based on the voting and other input, you basically get qualified in some particular area of domain expertise
* Once you are "an expert" they give you super powers.. not yet sure what those are but perhaps you get to vote on all of the answers within your area of expertise.

Thoughts...
All of this seems good.. I'm wondering if I'm going to get any points for having a very broad range of experience. There are some questions and problems which are better suited for generalists and other (like open heart surgery) best left to specialists with lots of hands on experience..

Is it moderated?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many holes in shredded wheat biscuit?
Will god punish me for killing spiders?
Are trolls made welcome here?
Scat porn or watersports?
Is cowboy neal cool?

Re:Is it moderated?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many fingers can y'all fit up your anus?

For 12 Qwest Coins

[Anne_Nonymous]

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Re:For 12 Qwest Coins

[Anonymous Coward]

African or European?

Re:For 12 Qwest Coins

[Anne_Nonymous]

Huh? I... I don't know that. Auuuuuuuugh!

This reminds me...

[nastybastard]

This reminds me of experts-exchange. http://www.experts-exchange.com/

Re:This reminds me...

[Cylix]

I'm a member of ee...

I'm not exactly a fan of the service. The rewards are far far too low. If I spend 30 minutes or longer answer a particularly rough question I might get some points out of it. EE does have some good ones and some good answers.

However, that reward is pretty much nothing compared to what they will get when someone needs to see those answers. I myself started because I /needed/ a question to be answered and search results were turning up nil. (It was apparently answered and the post was quite good).

SO yeah, EE will take my post and generate a good deal of revenue off of that. The other route is to begin answering questions and at some point I get free access? I'm not entirely sure how that works there.

A better replacement would be a profit sharing setup... now if I could just get some capitol.

Re:This reminds me...

[HappyEngineer]

I just pay the monthly fee to get unlimited points. I ask questions there all the time. Sometimes they're answered and sometimes not, but when they're answered they're often answered in a helpful way.

Sometimes it's just easiest to ask someone when I'm stuck with something. I had problems setting up qmail. I could have gone to a forum and been told that I should read the manual. But, instead I went to EE and actually got a helpful answer.

but I was finally about to answer

[jordan314]

But I was finally about to reply to the second round of questions to become a google answer researcher! Ok that's not entirely true. I did make it to the second round in 2002 but I gave up because the questions they asked were so hard. The address of the questions they asked was http://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=applyqu estions but it doesn't seem to work anymore. I can't find 'em on google cache or archive.org either. Anyone have them? They paralleled the open questions google would sometimes ask engineers when they were looking for people to hire.

Only US/Canada

[MattSparkes]

Us UK dwellers are out of luck with this service.

Re:Only US/Canada

[MajinBlayze]

Reminds me of Red vs Blue:
  I'm a pacifist
  Your a thing that babies suck on?
  No man, that's a pediphile
  I think he means pacifier
  Oh... I was thinking of something else

an alternative

[true_majik]

There's also questionville.com which is free (for now at least).

Replying to my own question.

[DZR]

Perplexed as to why Amazon would launch two separate Question and Answer services, NowNow and AskVille I did some googling and thought I'd share what I came up with.

Firstly, it turns out that someone has already asked this on AskVille and the answers are fairly to the point. Also O'Reilly Radar has a post about the two services.

The gist of it is: AskVille is like Yahoo! Answers and NowNow is like 82ASK. NowNow is specifically set up for mobile users who need to find answers quickly. Questions are farmed out to Mechanical Turk where people are paid real cash money to answer questions.

However, Amazon have completely dropped the ball with NowNow:

1. The interface is mobile email! It's specifically for mobile phones and yet they've used email instead of the obvious choice of SMS.
2. Because they've chosen email instead of SMS they've also made the billing procedure more complicated. While the service is beta it is free, but I presume that in order to use it when it goes live you will have to set up some sort of Amazon account. So you have to know in advance that you might one day need to use the service, unlike with 82ASK.
3. Mechanical Turk is notoriously badly paid, and absolutely anyone can join it. So the researchers aren't vetted or trained like 82ASK's texperts are, and they're nowhere near as well paid as texperts, so they can't guarantee the same quality of answers as 82ASK.

AskVille has some interesting twists on Yahoo! Answers. Like an online game answers earn virtual money, and there is more community vetting and rating of answers and answerers then there is on Yahoo! Answers.

If they'd been really innovative they would have merged the best bits of each into on single product with both mobile and web access. If they'd done that there would be reason for 82ASK to be worried. But as it is I think they've blown it.

An actual question from Askville:

[mikeasu]

"where can I find professional blouses or button downs for large busted, small waisted women?" Bet on how many answers take the form of: "Please submit pics so I can properly answer your question" I call 283...

Wiki

[milatchi]

Why do I need this when I have Wikipedia?

why beta??

[Treates2]

it's always beta, beta this, beta that.. seems like all socalled self-proclaimed web 2.0 websites are Something--something (Beta!) yay for beta, when did beta become cool?!

Would you please share it with us?

[hummassa]

Or do you want me to shell out US$ 2.5 to you? I will, if it's easy... but I must say it would be very cheap of you (especially considering that your answer will be googlable if you post it here, and you will save the next guy US$ 5).

Re:Would you please share it with us?

[jfengel]

That's the thing: they don't have a name. They're just "comedy/tragedy masks".

Ironically, I did google my own answer at one point. I asked the question and put up twenty bucks (not five; I mis-remembered), but never received any notification that there was an answer. I forgot entirely about it until a few months later when I tried to answer the question, and my own question came up on Google.

Anyway, here's my query:

http://www.answers.google.com/answers/threadview?i d=348285