Users of the eclectic questions and answers service Fluther have a new way to post questions and keep an eye on answers. Early Wednesday the company rolled out support for instant messaging through the use of an IM bot. By messaging the Flutherbot, your question will get posted immediately with any replies getting sent back as both instant messages and to whatever e-mail address you specify.
The service is limited to AOL IM users for the time being, although Fluther founder Ben Finkel tells me bots for other protocols are on the way in the next couple of weeks.
When I first heard about this I was a little worried that some of the protective filters that keep truly dumb questions from making it on the site had effectively been lifted. The site still relies heavily on user moderation to weed out the chaff, but to me the idea of someone simply being able to fire off an IM to post a question seemed like a potential pitfall.
The good news is that users need to jump through a couple of hoops before a question will show up on the front page. For instance, you have to type out the subject, description, and tags as separate IM messages before again verifying that you want to post the question. It's not as easy as simply sending a stray IM to the bot and having it go live to the site. Nor is it hard enough to make you want to visit the site to do the asking.
Finkel also tells me that "users without sufficient 'lurve' points [Fluther's karma system] will have their questions go to a pending area when asked from IM, where our moderators can approve them. We'll keep playing with these rules and tweaking them as necessary. Since quality is paramount to us, so we're going to be vigilant in ensuring this new feature doesn't lower it."
Questions asked through the IM bot get a special IM tag, just like those sent through the site's iPhone portal. There is, however no way to sort through these short of using the search feature in your browser.
I continue to be impressed by Fluther. Admittedly I use it rarely over simply typing my question into Google, but some of its flourishes like showing you who is answering your question in real time, and clumping together related questions makes it a site both a resource and a source of entertainment.
Asking Fluther.com a question can now be done in your favorite IM client.
(Credit: CNET networks)
Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called "Your Fluther." It lets you follow other people's activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It's a companion to the built-in recommendation engine "just for you" that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it's an easy way to create a private group of users who you'd rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.
One thing I'd like to see added to that feed is users' responses to other people's questions as many of the site's best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.
Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it's got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There's honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.
If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
I came across an interesting site a few minutes ago from a BACN message from Myles Weissleder, creator of the SF New Tech Meetup group. One of the presenters, Mosio, will be showing off its site at next week's meetup. The company specializes in mobile Q&A, letting anyone with a phone ask a question via SMS or e-mail and get public replies back from other Mosio members. The site launched at the beginning of August and has since answered a good number of questions.
Like some other Q&A services, to ask and answer a question you've got to be a registered user, which Mosio calls "QnAgents." Unlike some expert-driven sites such as Citizendium, there are no prerequisites for being a Mosio agent, just the hope that you know the answers to the questions you're answering, or will go through the effort to research them. To ask a question, just write it as a text message and send it to ask@mosio.com. If anyone answers, you'll get a text back with his or her response. You can also check on Mosio's Web site for any replies. When you first ask a question, the system will automatically create a username and password for Mosio's site, so you can join up later to start befriending other Mosio users to track their responses.
In addition to simple Q&A, Mosio also offers a host of "apps," which are free, subscription-based text services that range from birthday reminders to content feeds from news providers. Like Twitter's tracking feature, you can turn them off and on, either by Web or through your phone. There's even a random Chuck Norris fact generator that admittedly is pretty useless, but free nonetheless.
I have to be honest, the look and feel of Mosio doesn't have anything on my other favorite Q&A site Fluther (review), but I'm really digging the mobile angle. Having just recently pulled the trigger on data for my phone after being on a barebones voice-only plan for the better part of a decade, I know there's a lot to be said for a site that lets you handle your business via SMS.
There is one big thing Mosio seems to be missing: a way to search through prior questions and answers. I suppose Mosio assumes that if you're visiting the site from your browser, you're on the Internet anyway, and can find the information elsewhere. Considering what Fluther and other Q&A repositories have done, though, a search with answers from humans might save you a question in the first place.
Related: Download.com's directory listing for Mosio
Ask a question. Get a response. At least that's the hope at Mosio, which is a questions-and-answers service with a mobile focus.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Hundreds of Web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for Apple's iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning, and wrapped up late Sunday afternoon when each team had a chance to present its app.
Some teams included a group of Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the 10 most memorable creations:
10. iPhoneVote This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn't used for its official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room.
9. AppMarks If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a Web app or HTML bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post a few days ago. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If the AppMarks people want users to add AppMarks as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products, like Mojits, that are right on their heels.
8. PickleView The only sports application presented was called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a pickle is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Most will remember it well from the 1990s classic,The Sandlot.
Their iPhone app visualizes a box-score view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView's friends. I am not sure if that's how this app works, but the developers have a cool concept.
... Read more
Fluther is a social question and answer site. Like similar services, it gives people a place to ask and answer questions amid a community of users. Fluther has taken this idea and given it an interesting twist, in adding a built-in tracking service. This service keeps track of your activity on the site and will let you monitor questions you've asked or answered in real time. The service also promises to direct questions toward so-called experts once they've successfully answered several questions in a certain topic or area of interest.
Oh, and if you're wondering what that name means, it's the technical term for a group of jellyfish. And for the pronunciation aficionados out there, it rhymes with "brother."
One of the more interesting tools on Fluther is the question browser, which displays question topics in a large tag cloud. Users enter these topics when adding their questions, and the larger tags indicate more questions in that topic. When viewing a question, you can also see related questions, which Fluther calls "siblings."
Fluther users can ask questions that can get answered by others in the Fluther community. The answers are displayed chronologically.
(Credit: CNET Networks)To maintain a community feel, Fluther has implemented a fairly straightforward prestige system. You get points for continuing to use the site, as well as for the way others value your questions and answers. You can rank a question or answer, and if you come across one you feel is inaccurate or off-topic, you can also flag it. All of this gets displayed in your profile, and as a star rating under your name.
Fluther joins several other Q&A sites out there. Three of the more popular ones are Yahoo Answers, Microsoft's QnA, and Ask Metafilter. All three keep track of user interaction and participation, although Fluther's intimate feel is what attracted me to it in the first place.
The one thing that irks me about these services is that as they grow, questions and answers often get lost in the shuffle. Likewise, you're bound to see duplicates, spam, and a lack of educated answers. While the prestige system can help users self-enforce this, ultimately it's up to the creators to moderate and create tools that can empower responsible and trustworthy users.
[via Biz Stone:Genius]
- prev
- 1
- next
