Solo Technology

Got questions that need answers? Chock full of answers and looking for questions? Amazon has new entry in this space called Askville. What is it?

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you can share what you know. You can learn something new everyday or help and meet others using your knowledge. Askville even helps you learn by giving you cool tools to help you find information online while you are answering questions. It’s all about sharing—what you know and what you want to know—so go ahead and meet someone new today and Askville!

Google had something similar called Google Answers that recently closed up shop.

Yahoo! has Yahoo! Answers which I wrote about almost exactly one year ago. I found it interesting at first but soon drifted away. I’m not sure why, but I think signal to noise was one part and the other part was it got tiring piling up “points” for no purpose.

Now we have Amazon’s entry which is similar to the two above, but with some twists. It sounds like a Role Playing Game as it has Experience Points, Levels and Quest Coins. Now, I’ll be honest and confess I haven’t completely read up on the fine details of those, but knowing there may be some tangibles associated makes coming back to answer questions a bit more compelling. It’ll be interesting to see what shows up at “Questville” next year.

One feature of Askville that I like quite a bit is that questions can be tagged. Tags can then be added to your personal “watch list”. What are we missing? No RSS feeds for those tags or watch lists… maybe that’s something that will get added later? Sure seems like an obvious gap in the Web 2.0 world. Can’t have tags without feeds, right?

If nothing else, it is a fun way to kill time, learn new things and, hopefully, help folks out.

6 Responses to “Amazon’s Askville”

1. Rich G. on December 12th, 2006 1:03 pm
   

   Oddly enough I tried posting a response to this twice with my phone and both times it gave me a 403 forbidden. I’m able to send gmail with it and read your site, but for some reason I can’t post comments to it.
   That’s too bad, wonder what browser and OS it would have said I was using. :/

2. Udi on December 13th, 2006 2:45 pm
   

   FYI - Yahoo! Answers has RSS for searches. So while there aren’t any tags, you can still get very granular via search and monitor the question stream that way.

3. Simplerich on December 13th, 2006 3:04 pm
   

   thank you for the help with the phone. I must have a substandard browser built in.

4. Chris on December 13th, 2006 3:13 pm
   

   Udi - Good point, thanks for bringing that up.

   Rich - was really hoping to see an interesting user agent from the phone. Pity we couldn’t convince it to post a comment.

5. Rich G. on December 15th, 2006 7:30 pm
   

   Bad Behavior released an update today that addresses problems with verizon users on the EVDO network, and that is me.

6. Chris on December 15th, 2006 9:30 pm
   

   Hey Rich - I’ll be updating as soon as the BB site is back up.

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