After four months of private beta, Windows Live QnA (Question and Answer) opens to the public today. There is no shortage of question and answer services online, it’s almost becoming a requirement for portals. If the number of users is important in such a service, though, then the Live offering may be particularly appealing as it ramps up.
The service is a whole lot like the popular Yahoo! Answers, which is growing as much as 35% per month. The primary differences being that Live QnA uses tags instead of categories and offers more sophisticated alerts via MSN Alerts. Tags will make the site much easier to explore by clicking through other peoples’ terms of categorization instead of a stab in the dark full text query for terms similar to your own. The service is only available in English so far, but the Live team says to be patient - more languages are on the way.
Yahoo! Answers offers a watchlist on your dashboard page, which is convenient. It also launched an API two weeks ago today, so developers may come up with some interesting uses of the data. Yahoo! Answers has also got a very loyal user base already. Note also our coverage of an Israeli startup in this space, Yedda, which launched earlier this month.
Live QnA isn’t listed on the front page of the Live.com site yet so if you want to see it you have to go directly to its page, qna.live.com. There are many startups in this space, some with innovative models like compensation for answers. Until one of those models better proves itself, it makes sense for Live.com to offer a straight forward QnA service with the addition of tags.
Comments
Sounds like another great, user-driven source for online research. The tags are an interesting addition, but I am starting to think that tags are over used in the Web 2.0 world. There are some great uses for them, but most sites are overusing them now.
In Web 2.0, you should never be afraid to ask questions. Your questions and comments are the roots of version 2.0. If you did not questions the way thing are, then some great application such as this on might not exist. Ignorance is not bliss. Currently, Yahoo is thriving with Yahoo Answer. You have more to lose not asking.
WHAT WAY YOUR QUESTIONS ?
Woohoo. Out of beta. Time to open up the bourbon.
What a great service.. oh wait.. aren’t there like 20 QnA sites came out in the last month and a half, none is really offering anything different then the other?
And by the way, those who are quick to point to yahoo Answers and how they “nailed it down”, let me remind you yahoo would not have anything down if they didn’t PUMP UP the traffic from their organic results 24/7. Anyone asked themselves how much does it cost yahoo to create Answers? What value of clicks are they sending there? You would find out the effort is in the tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars.
>There are many startups in this space, some with innovative models like compensation for answers.
Innovative? Didn’t Google Answers debut with compensation for answers umpteen years ago?
overusing tags? I’m not even sure how that’s possible. EVERYTHING should be tagged, it makes things easier to find. I think even tags should be tagged. I think YOU should be tagged Skip Trace. I would tag you “tagnorant”. That is a new word I just invented to describe people that are oblivious to the wonders of tagging. Actually looks like I lied, I wasn’t the first to use that word: http://www.urbandictionary.com.....=tagnorant
I think it’s strange when services like this DON’T use tags. I think Google is downright weird for shunning tags in so many of their products where they could be used quite effectively. TAGGING IS THE FUTURE. I think I will tag the future. I will tag it “tagging”. now where did I put those crazy pills.
Knowledge, at my fingertips. Ohh yeah.
tagging is nothing more than giving something multiple categories to be listed under.
Tags should be used in moderation, and a universal tag limit of 3 or 4 tags should be impossed per object, other wise a single question could be tagged under every word in the dictionary.
lives implementation is a little annoying having to add tags one by one, which is probably there to encourage less tags, but it means extra work (clicks) for each tag
also I find their LIVE logos & images of people standing around in white shirts a little utopian and somewhat creepy.
I read a while back internet data doubles itself every 45 days. Tagging obviously isn’t scalable. I believe it’s why google never got into it.
Tagging needs to be done by everyone, not just the person creating or submitting the content. This is where most sites go totally wrong (and looks like it’s where QnA has gone wrong too). Tagging needs reinforcement to be effective, and there are ways to downgrade overuse and misuse of tags.
Bill, Tagging is MUCH more than giving something multiple categories to be listed under. Not everyone uses the same terminology when searching or tagging. If I were to categorize something canine and someone searches for dog then it wouldn’t come up without quite a bit of fanciness going on. With tagging, one person may tag it dog, another dogs, another canine, another a specific type of dog, another pets, another animals. And the result is that users will search for any of those and it will come up, they don’t have to limit themselves to some rigid category that is determined by one person. Maybe (MAYBE) it is a good idea for there to be a limit for one person tagging a single object, but tagging is most effective when more people submit tags, the more the merrier.
Tagging is basically the same as linking to something on the web. Search engines index that text and point it to the url it is anchored to. That alone, of course, is not enough data so they have ways of determining how important that link is (PageRank) and how much weight to give that text. The same principle should be used with tagging to make it truly effective.
Sal, tagging is much more scalable than general web search.
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