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.
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:
The interface is mobile email! It's specifically for mobile phones and yet they've used email instead of the obvious choice of SMS.
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.
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.
As a UK resident, I'm sadly all too aware of the NHS's woeful record when it comes to IT. So I understand why people are concerned that this will end up in a cock-up to end all cock-ups. But I also detect a sense of general resistance to the idea per se which I really don't get. As someone who lives in Europe and travels a lot it seems transparently obvious to me that a doctor in Spain (for example) having instant access to my medical records should I fall ill and need his help would be a good thing. I don't get the whole "this is big brother" attitude about this at all.
I don't understand the economics of spam. Apparently these people do make money. But how? In order to get their messages past all the anti-spam measures around these days, these guys have to send out almost totally undreadable misspelt nonsense with completely misleading subject lines. I can't beleieve that people receive these things and then go on to purchase something. It doesn't make sense.
According to the Wikipedia article Demographics of the United States, 80% of the population lives in urban and suburban areas, and yet only 9 cities in the USA have a population of more than one million. Is this just a weird effect of the way that American city limits are drawn? By which I mean, if you included the greater metropolitan areas of cities in their population count would you actually end up with many many more cities with more than a million people? I just can't work out how you fit 80% of 300 million people into such small cities.
Huh. Jeffrey Zeldman linked to my blog.
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Problems at the W3C
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· Score: 2, Funny
"me" in that context is a phonetic transcription of how people in that dialect of English pronounce the word "my". Are you suggesting that they also spelled it that way?
Re:Heres the post everyone should read first
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Mozilla RC3 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
The problem is with IE NOT Mozilla. You could be referring to one of two CSS property/values pairs:
position : fixed;
background-attachment : fixed;
Mozilla gets both right. IE/Win has no support for the first, and implements the second incorrectly. The CSS spec clearly states that background images should be fixed relative to the view-port and NOT the element box. IE/Win does the opposite. So, why not take the trouble to know what you are talking about before posting nonsense like this?
Slashdot Mirror
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.
Amazon now have two question answering services? Because NowNow is also by Amazon. Why would they start two such similar services?
As a UK resident, I'm sadly all too aware of the NHS's woeful record when it comes to IT. So I understand why people are concerned that this will end up in a cock-up to end all cock-ups. But I also detect a sense of general resistance to the idea per se which I really don't get. As someone who lives in Europe and travels a lot it seems transparently obvious to me that a doctor in Spain (for example) having instant access to my medical records should I fall ill and need his help would be a good thing. I don't get the whole "this is big brother" attitude about this at all.
I don't understand the economics of spam. Apparently these people do make money. But how? In order to get their messages past all the anti-spam measures around these days, these guys have to send out almost totally undreadable misspelt nonsense with completely misleading subject lines. I can't beleieve that people receive these things and then go on to purchase something. It doesn't make sense.
According to the Wikipedia article Demographics of the United States, 80% of the population lives in urban and suburban areas, and yet only 9 cities in the USA have a population of more than one million. Is this just a weird effect of the way that American city limits are drawn? By which I mean, if you included the greater metropolitan areas of cities in their population count would you actually end up with many many more cities with more than a million people? I just can't work out how you fit 80% of 300 million people into such small cities.
Dude, I'm like famous. So now I have two readers.
"me" in that context is a phonetic transcription of how people in that dialect of English pronounce the word "my". Are you suggesting that they also spelled it that way?
The problem is with IE NOT Mozilla. You could be referring to one of two CSS property/values pairs:
Mozilla gets both right. IE/Win has no support for the first, and implements the second incorrectly. The CSS spec clearly states that background images should be fixed relative to the view-port and NOT the element box. IE/Win does the opposite. So, why not take the trouble to know what you are talking about before posting nonsense like this?