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?"

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.

Re:Here's a question

[Psycosys]

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

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?

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.

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.

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.