Category: answers

Where are the best answers to business questions?

Reid Hoffman reminded me the other day that I needed to take a look at the LinkedIn Answers service, the peer-to-peer Q&A service for business. It obviously emulates much of the Yahoo! Answers product, particularly the user experience, so I thought I’d do a little test.


It surprised me in a way that I didn’t expect…

I wondered what would happen if I posted the same question in both LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo! Answers. Of course, I posted a work-related question. This would make the test as nearly apples-to-apples as it could be.

I’ve been wanting to know more about the API market, size, share, segmentation, and all that good market data that defines an industry. The web services market is pretty loosely defined still, and I want to know where the best research is. So here’s what I asked on both sites:

“Where is the best market research on APIs and web services?”

LinkedIn:
– 2 answers within a day
– Both pointed to John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb
– The 3rd post came in 5 days later listing a few relevant blogs in addition to ProgrammableWeb

Yahoo!:
– 2 answers in less than an hour
– The 1st answers also pointed to ProgrammableWeb
– The 2nd listed 3 more sites that were sort of relevant

I kind of expected this behavior, but I certainly didn’t expect that I would get the same answer in the end. Yes, ProgrammableWeb is very good. It’s a highly relevant answer to my question, though not exactly the answer I was hoping for.

In some ways, I expected LinkedIn to give me better answers given both the focus and also how broad the Yahoo! Answers demographic must be, but this shows how participatory media can reach incredibly deep into the micro niche even when it’s a mass consumer service.

So, who won this test? I’m inclined to believe that speed matters more, particularly if the answers turn out to be the same. What do you think?

Top 5 new business ideas

The month of lists has begun, so I decided to rank the business ideas from the last year that could or should be a big deal in the next year. Most of these ideas and companies have actually been around longer than 12 months, but they either reached a certain critical mass or captured my imagination in a new way recently.

1) Scrobbling
All my listening behavior are belong to Last.fm. They figured out how to not only capture what I listen to but also to incentivize me to keep my behavior data with them. Since my listening data is open for other services to use, I am willingly giving Last.fm the power to broker that data with other providers on behalf. That’s a very strong position to be in.

2) Meta ad networks
Feedburner and Right Media figured out that ad networks can be networked into meta networks. Right Media went the extra step and opened up their APIs so that someone can build a white label ad exchange of their own using the Right Media tools. All you need are advertisers and publishers, and you’ve suddenly got a media market of your own. I can’t help but wonder if these guys have stepped into the big leagues with the next really important revenue model.

3) Pay-as-you-go storage, computing, whatever
Amazon impresses me on so many levels even if they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. They are making it happen just by doing smart things with the resources already in their arsenal. Similarly, Flickr understands that the APIs you use to build your web site are the same APIs you want to open up as a service, and it’s paying off handsomely for them. The formula here is one part optimizing resources and two parts confidence that your business won’t crash if you share your core assets with other people. Stir constantly.

4) People-powered knowledge
I really like the Yahoo! Answers experience. I also really like the concept behind MechanicalTurk where knowledge can be distributed as a service. Machines are at their best, in my opinion, when they make humans capable of doing things they couldn’t otherwise do, not least of which is making the universe of human knowledge more accessible.

5) Widget-mania
It wasn’t until I heard about the big revenues GlitterMaker was earning that I realized just how powerful this idea has become the last year or so. Beck’s customizable CD cover reinforced the idea that everything is a tattoo or a tattooable thing if you look at it that way…and many people do. If only I could run AdSense on my forehead.

Answering the Answers question

It wasn’t until someone much more tapped into pop culture than I am told me that the Yahoo! Answers product was cool that I considered it to be true. I didn’t get it at first. I wondered, “What’s the incentive to contribute? Maybe it works for kids. And when was the last time Yahoo! launched a cool product of its own anyway?”


Photo: Mr. Mark (reclining buddy)

I still don’t understand the incentive to answer questions, but despite that I’m amazed at the responses to the questions people post.

First, I love some of the philosophical dialog in the system. Deepak Chopra appeared in Answers with a question, and the answers were fantastic:

Q: “What do you think the role of individual transformation is in manifesting world peace?”
A: “…The question to me is not the role of individual transformation in manifesting world peace; but can mankind agree upon what the symbol of peace represents and if so, how might this further or progress all mankind’s evolution of the psychobiotic self.”

Second, it’s very social in a new kind of way. It’s like walking through a festival where you jump into a conversation with totally random people without any awkward formalitites. You ask a question, hear what people have to say and move on having a new perspective to take with you.

I asked one question about the need for our educational system to teach personal responsibility in the online world, and the responses were primarily from what appeared to be teens. I have no connection to the universe that is teenage but with this question I suddenly found myself in a very brief but relevant dialog with the people who are affected by the question.

Third, and I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise, you can get better information from people in this world than you can from your limited scope of offline friends.


Photo: _Faith

I was watching Prince perform on American Idol and kept asking myself, “What is it with this guy? Why is Prince such a big deal?” I started asking friends the same question, even people who are big Prince fans, and I couldn’t get a good answer. So, I posted a question on Answers. I figured that if someone could tell me why Prince matters then maybe it was actually useful in addition to being cool.

Sure enough, I got a couple of funny answers within a few minutes, but within about half an hour somebody convinced me that Prince was worth caring about:

“Prince is able to play multitude of instruments and genres. He mastered the piano at seven, and 6 instruments by 12. He is the youngest to ever produce his own albums at the age of 19. He takes risks and help define the sounds of the 80’s. He was the first black artist to appear on MTV. Not Michael Jackson.”

But there are a few things I’d love to see Answers do better. It’s so random and dense that I need some kind of UI for surfacing stuff that might matter to me. I like that when I post a question it tries to point me to similar questions that have already been answered.

I also want to have some kind of natural incentive for answering other people’s questions. Points won’t do it. Maybe I don’t get it still, but I don’t have any desire to add my knowledge into the pool, yet.

Lastly, I’d love to see the back end opened up as a service…completely. Community sites of all types including publishers should be able to skin the service for their users which would then contribute more data to the wider knowledge pool. I can imagine a site like PCWorld.com using Answers to help their users help each other answer laptop fix-it types of questions or maybe storage device shopping advice.

Obviously, my comments have to be taken with a grain of salt since I share the same employer as the Answers team. But the purpose in writing this was less about promotion and more about exploring social incentives online with a new real world example. There’s more to learn from Answers, I’m sure, but there’s lots to be emulated, as well.