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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?"
Has anyone actually used one of these services for a real inquiry?
YES
That will be $15.95 please.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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?
How many Quest coins are you offering for an answer to this question?
Why bother with one of these services when I can just Ask Slashdot for free?
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.
Error:
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.
stuff |
Do you accept sexual favors as payment?
YES
Here is a large cucumber and a tube of K.Y. lube. Begin. I shall watch.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"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?
I suppose you're free to chose. Which would you like flogged more, your ass or your AMEX?
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.
Amazon now have two question answering services? Because NowNow is also by Amazon. Why would they start two such similar services?
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.
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)
http://www.hawknest.com/
What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
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.
Can I bum a sig?
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).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
More like:
YES
That will be $0 please.
*one week later*
"Hey, why the fuck did Amazon just bill my credit card $15.95?"
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I'm a member of ee...
/needed/ a question to be answered and search results were turning up nil. (It was apparently answered and the post was quite good).
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
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.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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:
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.
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.
"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...