Crowd-sourced decision-making helper Hunch.com is out of private beta today. The site helps people make decisions based on how they answer questions from user-created quizzes (See our hands-on from April). Anyone can create these, however the strength of the site is that they can be linked to credible, outside sources to back up any advice or claims. There's also an algorithm that learns more about you as you use the site. The more it knows, the less of the quiz questions you have to answer to get valid recommendations.
Hunch says you only need to answer 10 sample questions for it to start delivering customized recommendations. However, for some topics, such as personal health or survival situations, it's worth going through the motions of answering each individual question. The efficacy of that depends on how well the quiz was put together though. The way Hunch handles that is to put newly-created quizzes into a holding tank called "the Workshop" where other users can bang on it, and provide feedback or fixes. If enough people like it, it graduates to being a part of the site. Otherwise it gets put into the "scrap heap" where you can see the titles and creators, but not the quizzes themselves.
Certain parts of Hunch--like medical advice, or troubleshooting guides like this bear attack defense one--are one of the service's strong points.
(Credit: CNET)Sites like Hunch get a great deal of traffic from search engines, which is where it may have a leg up on the competition. Since each quiz is made up of multiple questions, there is a higher potential of it showing up in searches that go outside of the main question. Hunch can then drive people to single topics, or topic pages where the site can sell targeted ad units. As it stands, the site makes most of its money off of referrals to commerce sites like Amazon, and sponsored links on result pages.
I'm still not sold on Hunch. For some things, like troubleshooting, or medical advice there's real potential for a system that can weed out irrelevant suggestions based on how you answer questions. However, others like "whether or not you should quit your job," or "what should I eat for lunch?" should be something people figure out on their own, or with the help of friends who don't need to use an algorithm.
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)
A few months back my roommate's rare house plant was dying. In a last ditch effort to bring it back to life, he enlisted my help. We scoured various message boards and Q&A sites with little success to get help identifying the plant (he got it as a gift).
The plant ended up going to that big greenhouse in the sky. The experience made me realize there's a pretty basic need for sites, such as PicAnswers, which lets anyone upload a picture and ask a question about it. Interestingly, the amount of high profile Q&A services that don't let users do this is surprising. One of the few to allow it is the AOL-owned Yedda, while sites such as Yahoo Answers, Microsoft's QnA Live, and Amazon.com's Askville are limited to text.
This looks like a toy gun but it's actually cable tie gun, which was correctly ID'd by the Q&A community at PicAnswers.com
(Credit: CNET Networks)Like Amazon's Mechanical Turk project, PicAnswers is driven by humans. People upload their photos, and other users chime in if they can answer the query. A lot of the questions posed on the site range from simple identification issues like "what the heck is this?" to advice about what to do about a problem posted in the picture.
Here are a couple of my favorites so far:
Toothpick or food skewer?
My chili is yellow
Is there any Chinese poison in this toy?
Despite its simplicity, PicAnswers is missing two very helpful components: a way to vote on other user's answers to help filter down the best responses, and a karma system that makes it worthwhile to answer other people's questions. As it stands, you're left to sort through the answers yourself and answer out of the goodness of your heart. I'm hoping the site's creators add these soon. In the meantime, it's definitely worth bookmarking for the next time you unearth something that needs photo identification.
Mosio the mobile questions and answers service I wrote about last year has a really cool and useful new feature today called Twitter Answers. Mosio users simply need to befriend the Mosio Twitter bot, and ask it any questions using Twitter's direct messaging feature. Other users who have befriended the bot will get your question (syndicated from the bot), and up to four of them can directly reply to you.
While the entire thread is somewhat meaningless with Twitter's lack of message threading, hopping over to Mosio you can see the entire exchange in its correct order. Better yet, if any regular Mosio members are able to answer your question, those answers will be shared over to Twitter.
For Mosio users who want to avoid using their phone's keypad, there is some reprieve. Last month Mosio partnered with Jott to set up a voice-to-text system that lets people ask questions using a standard phone call. Jott will then convert their voice question over to text and post it to the service, while sending any replies back in the form of SMS messages. Other users are able to follow along on Mosio's main page, their phone, and now on Twitter.
I still think one of the best uses of Mosio is to help sort out bar bets or random questions while out and about. Mobile users with a data plan can turn to Google or some other search engine to find out what they're looking for, but services like Mosio, Fluther, and Yahoo Answers provide a human touch in many areas that search engines cannot.
On a side note, Mosio was at SF Beta last night showing this off, and they had by far the most inventive Web swag I've seen in a long time. Witness, the adhesive mustache. How can you not remember this?
Best, Web swag. Ever.
(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)
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]
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