Amazon launched a new Question and Answer service called Askville. Its interesting that Google announced that they were shutting down Google Answers on 28th Nov. and here we have Amazon launching a Q&A service.
The difference between Google Answers and other Q&A services by Yahoo, Microsoft and now Amazon is that its not monetary based ie. you dont need to pay $$ in order to get your questions answered. On top of it Google had built an “expert” selection system where they had to select users who were deemed “experts” in certain categories. Unfortunately, such a system fails to catch up with the “long-tail” – its just not scalable.
Going back to Askville, does anyone see how similar it is to Yahoo Answers in terms of the UI? Try and ask a question in both these services and it feels like Amazon has just copied Yahoo Answers screen for screen. Now, what Yahoo Answers has going for it is the “Scale” of Yahoo – Yahoo has effectively used its reach and distribution platform to build traction for the service. I believe it now has 60 million users and 160 million answers. So what does Amazon have that can compete with this scale? Its top rated reviewers. These are folks that the Amazon community has identified as “experts” in certain categories. Amazon has the opportunity to target these set of users to build a community of answerers and questioners to ensure the high quality of the system.
I am curious to see if they can pull this off and whether they can get these top reviewers to start sharing their knowledge. Good Luck to the Amazon Askville team!
