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?"

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?

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.

How does this differ from NowNow?

[DZR]

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

Replying to my own question.

[DZR]

Perplexed as to why Amazon would launch two separate Question and Answer services, NowNow [nownow.com] and AskVille [amazon.com] 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. [amazon.com] Also O'Reilly Radar has a post about the two services. [oreilly.com]

The gist of it is: AskVille is like Yahoo! Answers and NowNow is like 82ASK [82ask.com]. NowNow is specifically set up for mobile users who need to find answers quickly. Questions are farmed out to Mechanical Turk [mturk.com] 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.