Amazon Askville Launches With Dungeons & Dragons Angle

It is cool that amazon is leveraging their new Mechanical Turk service for q&a.
To me, yahoo’s service is not for very serious questions. It sounds like Amazon’s has several features to correct this problem. Yahoo didn’t have trouble brining people to answer questions. The trouble is in the quality of answers. Hopefully, amazon’s features with materialized points can improve the quality. Let’s wait and see.

Wow, that’s a great idea. Amazon is well leveraged to create a community where people provide this service in return for their choice of stuff from amazon.

Love the idea of collective sharing of intelligence. Thought all the ‘Answers’ sites were amazing when they launched. Sometimes they run off track these days, but still can be really useful, though you have to wade through junk. Also like the potential of an incentive system as a way to improve the quality. Just dont know if it will turn out to be useful or a gimmick. I am not sure of the D&D theme to the system. are they shooting for a specific demo, or just being ‘creative’? any chance this could limit some ‘experts’ from participating who think it does not seem quite serious?

I like their slightly different take on Q&A. It’s nice to see that people will lose points for lame answers and you can’t see others’ answers while question is open. Hopefully this will at least partially prevent it from turning into the kindergarden that Yahoo Answers has become.

Meant D&D/virtual world angle. It is not a D&D theme. Sorry

I never saw Mechanical Turk as a real life project, but askville changes it. Using points to buy stuff from Amazon will get lots of serious QnA. On Y! Answers, I mostly find questions which can be easily Googled (or perhaps Yahooed) for answers. I think they need to work a bit on their color scheme.

this is still a pseudo-market based on play money. tons us users? sure. tons of content? sure. better than yahoo answers? sure. make amazon money? sure. but until the authors themselves can build a sustainable business out of the offering, the content will feel like the funny money it creates.

Does it have to be so fugly and clunky? Yahoo Answers looks elegant compared to this thing. And fix that horizontal scrollbar in Firefox, that’s really unprofessional looking.

And for a content site, what’s that teeny little search box doing all the way at the bottom of the home page?

Lol my ex-wife loved D&D and would split Christmas if she knew about this (i’m not gonna tell her).

I didn’t divorce her for that though, but for different reasons entirely.

Amazon seems to be on a Web Service launch roll… just a few days ago they launched another service that also uses Mechanical Turk called unspun.com.

It will be interesting to see if amazon’s core user base adopts this feature. We’re trying a similar idea but it’s centered around finding products with people paying others for qualified sales leads.

-John

PS Interesting that their logo looks awfully similar to favorville.com

John - Other than the sites both having similar names i wouldn’t say the logos look “awfully” similar.

Good idea. Specially the points accumulation and all. Incentive is very important in community participation. I think Amazon has hit the target right on!

I gave this a shot and it was actually pretty fun. In addition to the usual joy of getting to hear yourself talk, as it were, the whole level thing was stoking the fire of competition in my belly.

The competition angle could possibly keep this service more serious.

Answering questions is a total ego trip for the user and now that I think about it, I can’t think of one user-generated content site that is this open and at the same time not cluttered up with spam and useless nonsense that doesn’t pit the egos of folks against one another(digg, wikipedia, etc)

Today’s lesson? If you’re going to have user-generated content and don’t want to have to actively moderate it, make it a pissing contest and things will sort themselves out. Seriously!

Rick - you’re absolutely right. We’re watching the community develop over on http://www.grupthink.com and the evolution is fascinating to watch. A handful of users are acquiring points like mad, but the only way they’re being so successful is by contributing quality content that really adds to the topic being discussed. Reward quality!

Indeed smart: tie real goods with intangible Q&A! Smart indeed. Why is Yahoo always one step behind everybody on everything? With the launch of Google checkout, I wonder whether Google answers get some inspiration out of Amazon!

Jamsterson, I’m really impressed with grupthink as well. Not the exact same thing of course, but it has attributes that are potentially quite a bit more impressive. I’m gonna be sure to look at it a whole lot closer tomorrow.

I was traveling yesterday and today and didn’t have a ton of time to really think about askville before writing. I’ve been playing around with it tonight some more. This thing has a chance at being incredibly popular based on the quest coin stuff. It all depends on how liquid the virtual currency is….It would be cool to have the ability to turn it into an amazon gift certificate, for example, which is probably the closest Amazon will come to making it have a cash equivalent. If they allow transfers of quest coins as they’ve said they will, people could theoretically start using it as a real currency for other things, as well.

Amazon’s thinking is similar to Second Life as far as creating a currency. I like what you say, Michael, about turning quest coins into Amazon gift certificates. It would be the same as exchanging your Linden dollars for an American Apparel T-shirt in Second Life.

The formerly siloed worlds of MMOs and social networks move inexorably closer.

And one day, the dominant metaphor for our online behavior will be the virtual world metaphor.

And let’s not forget about Otavo, Michael. If Amazon will tie in their QuestCoins with some real benefits, than this will probably seriously kick Otavo’s butt, which pursues the same strategy for some time now — but the points earned in Otavo’s “Quests” are just not meaningful enough, and they lack an infrastructure like Amazon. Really, Otavo should turn their userpoints into sth like a reputation-system, to be able to compete with Askville (what’s the expertise of people answering my questions anyway?)…
Lutz.W, Techcrush

Isnt that just like a forum?

I think this service is similar hatena question.
hatena is called japanese web2.0 company.

hatena:http://www.hatena.ne.jp/
hatena question:http://q.hatena.ne.jp/

The site seem to be oriented for people in USA.
The authentication process with the mobile phone is not necessary IMHO.

I was thinking the same thing Michael, that if there were some real value for the questpoints that it would solidify the service. However, I’m not even sure how necessary that really is. For the demographic that will brint he most value to these questions, egopoints are a bigger sell than products. I have a hunch that the aggregate quality of the community is enhanced when there’s nothing at stake but community recognition.

By not letting answerers see the previous answers, they are leveraging one of the principles of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom Of Crowds theory. However, this principle also says that one person may not be right all together, that you may need to pull together several answer contributions to get the best answer. There used to be a site called Kenlet.com that was doing something similar to the currency idea. You could put real cash into it or earn points by answering questions. You could list your expertise in your profile. It looks like someone mentioned this in the Microsoft Q&A post comments.

I think is a great idea on Amazon’s part, especially the incentive portion. Definetly a good way to give Yahoo! an immediate run. Hopefully this will be a Gmail-like situation, where businesses step up their game for greatter consumer benefits.

Nicely done - we’re doing points and levels on Kongregate (http://kongregate.com) as well. Also like Askville, they are currently only for bragging rights but will be more useful soon. We’re also going to give moderation powers to high-level users.

Nice idea overall, but I really don’t get why it is “US-only” with there mobile phone verification. Some American companies really needs to realize that the internet don’t stop at the US borders

cool!!!