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]
Question-and-answer Web sites can connect the curious with the well informed, but some fail to live up to their promise. For instance, Yahoo Answers covers a vast array of subjects, but too often it attracts too many teenyboppers. With the new LinkedIn Answers, however, you can tap into the wisdom of a professional crowd.
This could be a great way of reaching out to those in the know without having to directly contact individuals who aren't so familiar with you. You can close a question to all but a small circle of chosen contacts. I also like that LinkedIn Answers displays topics posted and answered by people within my extended network. And lest hungry job-seekers clutter the pages, you're supposed to admit while posing a question if you're promoting your services, looking for work, or seeking to hire someone.
Many of the queries regard specific business matters, such as, "Which Source Code Management solution are you using and why?" Other questions are less concrete. Last time I checked, there were 68 responses to: "Will thoughts produce reality?" I left my question about the potential success or failure of Microsoft Office 2007 open to all of the 9 million members of the LinkedIn community, while alerting one software-savvy contact within my network. In less than an hour, I received a pair of thoughtful replies. Each query remains open for seven days before it is archived. I hope that LinkedIn Answers will attempt to eliminate duplicate questions as Answerbag does.
Overall, the uncomplicated interface is a snap to navigate. Still, while it's simple to look up contacts' names, I couldn't find an easy way to fish through the questions by subject. So far, however, along with its directory of services, LinkedIn's Answers appears to be a natural fit for this popular networking service.
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