Mahalo is now answering your questions. The human-curated search engine/ condensed wiki guide is adding a Q&A service called Mahalo Answers to its mix. It is a combination of Yahoo Answers and the long-defunct Google Answers, with some cute avatars and virtual currency thrown in. (Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).
Like Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask or answer any question. But Mahalo Answers throws in a twist. If someone really wants to encourage the best answers, they can offer a tip in “Mahalo Dollars,” which can be funded through PayPal and are convertible into real dollars once a member has earned at least 40 of them. For those of you who remember Google Answers, it paired questioners with vetted researchers who found answers for a fee. This is slightly different in that questions are not assigned to a specific researcher. As many people can answer it as they want and all compete for the tip. Furthermore, the tip can be rescinded by the questioner if he or she is not satisfied with any of the answers.
To keep people honest, there is a reputation system. If a tip is withheld, you have to explain why. Reneg on too many tips, and nobody will want to answer any of your questions.
There is also a point system. Calacanis says he was inspired by many of the gaming startups at TechCrunch50, and how they were designed to keep players engaged by getting them to constantly level up. On Mahalo Answers, you get points for asking questions, answering them, providing the “best” answers, as well as adding links and gaining friends. (And guess who is the member with the most points accumulated during the closed beta? Calacanis).
As you get more points, you progress through different belt levels (white, yellow, green, etc.). It’s like a game. The higher belt you have, the more of an “expert” you are. One of the features of the site is that people can ask members direct questions. The more points you have, the more you can charge for your answers. Mahalo takes a 25 percent cut when Mahalo Dollars are converted back into regular currency Calacanis says:
If you can make knowledge into a game and help people make living, it is very powerful.
He considers Mahalo Answers to be the third plank of his company’s strategy, with human-powered search and abbreviated wiki guides being the first two. When someone answers a question, they are encouraged to add links, photos, and videos as part of their answer. Mahalo harvests all of those links, and the best answers become part of its topic guides. “The question and answer service becomes a way to make our guide better,” says Calacanis. That is, if enough people use it.
Mahalo is essentially paying for traffic here, or rather getting its users to pay for traffic. The prospect of making tips from other users will be the main draw for many visitors. The question is: Will that be enough to jumpstart more organic growth by improving upon the Q&A format and seeding the site with some really good answers? Or does Yahoo Answers with its 154 million monthly unique visitors worldwide (comScore) have too much momentum to ever be challenged?
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FIRST
We are cutting over right now… look for a new homepage at http://www.mahalo.com in the next 20 minutes!
You guys gotta see this video of BUsh getting a shoe thrown at him:
http://equedia.com/blog/view.php?entryId=651
Really, TC, you need to stop pimping the snake oil that Calacanis tries to peddle. This new scheme of his, if launched by ANY other startup, would’ve been shredded apart by you guys.
It’s funny how this guy Calacanis is actually sought after for business advice. Credit goes to him for being lucky and selling out for $25 million, but the advice he gives in regards to running a viable enterprise is silly and obvious enough to make a classroom full of 1st year business students burst out in laughter.
I can’t wait for the funding for this travesty to run out. It will spare us reading about this joke.
Hm, I registered for the beta but never got any mail back from the system. What happened?
Comments at TechCrunch are really at a high level these days…
I really like the layout of this new site!
I’ll wait and see. It seems like a lot of work for little bucks. Actually who uses Mahalo anyway?
Congrats to Jason and the Mahalo team! We hope to give our analysis on 8ninths.com soon!
All the best
Adam
If paying a small fee saves people from hours of online searching then this could really take off. Time=Money
If the comments above this one is what people with answer at Mahalo Answers, then its going to be fun seeing people with “negative reputations”
One service that did not get mentioned is HotDispatch which was highly popular some 7-8 years ago. I guess it was before its time!
Let’s see if Mahalo Answers does well where others have failed.
Brilliant strategy, congrats to @jasoncalacanis and the team for pulling this off.
Very, very smart JC. This way he has built a good revenue stream (25% of revenue), based on competing users’ answers, and the same time he will use the same content (answers) to improve its human Mahalo search engine.
You are a genius! I can hire you
Thanks for the kind words… we have high hopes for the service. We’re hoping it is a win, win, win… and win!
(win for users looking for answers, win for folks answering for money, win for us to generate non-advertising based revenue and a win for us to grow our database).
It’s a very addictive game we’ve built… i’m really interested to see how people use it!
It’s not a question of “HOW”. It’s a question of “IF”.
This is quite honestly one of the worst ideas to come out of Web 2.0 (i loathe that term by the way, can we please find a new one).
Let’s see…this “pay-to-play” (thanks Blagojevich!) theory has been tested and ultimately disproved. Does Mr. Calcanacananaicisnanis-not-gonna-work-here-anymore-anyway not remember “google answers”, “live search”, that crappy site that paid bloggers to blog about commercial products, etc, etc, etc, etc……
This thing we’ve got here, the “inter-webs” its full of free things, like advice and answers… it is not the psychic hotline. People will not pay for answers that they can get for free (legally, I mean we’re not talking napster here) on the net.
Though one might be inclined to agree that Internet users are inherently lazy, it is a physical laziness that is typically being referred to rather than a Internet search laziness. These apathetic web-loafers surf the information highway for hours…its part of the joy of doing so. Thus, I can only assume their flat bottoms won’t suffer from what Mr. Calcanaanaananisaisa would like others to believe is a severe case of
“ass-flattening-search-fatigue”.
Mr. Calcanananisaasisa…I give you 6, maybe 9 months before this “revenue model” crumbles under the weight of its own bullshit.
I thank you for this good laugh, though I’m inclined to believe your investors aren’t chuckling with me.
Peace,
In da middle east!
This “strategy” (if you can even call it that), has the nasty smell of desperation, which by all accounts is a stinky cologne, and in this case Mahalo wreaks of it!
Congrats to Jason and Tyler for doing a great job building this out. It’s a really smart concept with great potential.
Mahalo still struggles to figure out what it is that they actually do. The investors are gonna lose their shirts on this one.
What they do is human-powered search, i.e. user generated content meant to serve as a quick and easy digest of information. This new venture obviously fits in to that paradigm.
Whether or not it will develop in to something useful and influential, I don’t know. I still haven’t ever met a single person who uses Mahalo on a regular basis.
Human powered search is impossible with billions of pages and millions of domains
They got good traffic (I think mostly from techcrunch and other popular bloggers but not real users)
This “new venture” is another iteration on a product concept that’s been around for a decade.
It will be interesting how this pans out. I don’t really use much of the Q&A web sites. As a matter of fact, sometimes it is easier to find answers by posting questions using Twitter or even just Google search. Most people are already using Twitter, what is the real incentive to use Mahalo Answers?
I use Yahoo Q&A but outside of that, I don’t want a Yahoo account. I wish Google would reopen a Q&A site of their own instead of google product users having to sign up at a different site in order to ask a question and get an answer.
That being said, Mahalo Q&A seems like a smart idea. I’ve never heard of people using Twitter for asking questions but perhaps that has to do with not being a Twitter-er (twit?) myself.
Why do I not have a good feeling about this…
It will be interesting to watch this space. Experiments with human-powered web services have been going on (Amazon Turk) and while they have had some degree of success it’s hard to get a handle on how mainstream they can be. More complex services exist as well for freelancers and project-oriented work. Is there a market for the “what’s the answer to this simple question” outside of Google and Wikipedia which are free or ad supported?
Why do people continue to talk about this service as if it is an innovative concept? It’s not. It’s Yahoo! Answers revisited.
Cool Idea on the surface but selection of right answer and integrating it with Topic in mahalo repository will be challenge. outside of that its just a regular Q&A site. IMHO Money will not be much of incentive to spur usage.
however if Jason can get a good chunk of wikipedia /Knol contributor ( like Digg-Netscape thing ) and allow them to “sign Off ” a topic page than it can be killer. It can be a wikia done right .
BTW here is a related dicussion on /.
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/.....1248.shtml
Jason, well done. This is a really great idea. Go Mahalo and go humans!!!!!
Great idea …
I can’t get the smell of astroturf out of my nostrils…
Woow. Great idea.
Cool! Great astrotu… IDEA !
True to form the joke that is Mahalo continues.
Must be what happens with plenty of cash and no strategy.
TC would rip the shit out of anyone else with this lame concept but hail to the TechCrunch 50 chief of course.
I call BrownNosing.
Looks like their points system violates the patent #6064978 owned by Experts-Exchange.
That’s probably why Yahoo! and MSN Answers doesn’t let users redeem points.
No one and I mean no one in the real world has ever heard of Mahalo. A recent survey put knowledge of their brand in the US at 0.1% of the population.
p
Check :
whether story post to facebook or not.
Quite innovative and perhaps well thought out over sometime, I also think a drawing board must have been used here. I must blog about this innovation http://www.youtechno.info
When we have a question bothering regarding to any topic and we found the answer to that at Mahalo that’s worthy site to visit quite often,thanks for sharing .
Jason,
Model looks very similar to stackoverflow minus virtual dollars. And i like this model. Good luck.
Aside that, I requested for beta invitation in Google Docs form and yet to get an invite in my email. And it’s not accepting the same username in the site now when i try to register again. Any help?
cool,great idea n they know how to cash them
regards
aartha
http://truehotdeals.com
The popular Q&A site called WikiAnswers already has 26 Million uniques in the U.S. according to Quantcast. See http://www.quantcast.com/wiki.answers.com
I can see Lilo in the Avatar with a friend but where is Stitch?! First impressions of Mahalo Answers are good and lately I have found myself using Mahalo more so will definitely try this out!
I’ve a question: Will Mahalo deadpool before next June?
For those who prefer the Google Answers model (mentioned in the post), this lives on at Uclue where former Google Answers Researchers provide a paid research/Q&A service.
http://uclue.com/
Thumb Up Jason. What Mahalo needs now is MyWayOnNow Social Bookmarking.
Its a very good idea being a mashup of Yahoo Answers and Google Answers, I think what we’ll start seeing is a verticalisation of these kind of services.
There are verticals arround already e.g. http://answers.vigster.com which is Mahalo Answers but vertical for video games
These days you’ve got to offer incentives for people to use your network and justify why you are better than others if there are. There are too many social/networking services which are all free and hence the quality of your service plays a vital role.
Thanks for my 15 minutes of fame
http://www.mahalo.com/answers/.....-it-happen
Yet another Q&A service where users earn advertising royalties on all questions answered is at http://www.webanswers.com
Many users earn well north of $100 a month in cash.
http://www.webanswers.com
Has innovation died at Mahalo or what? All that energy to do what has already been done and been done better. They have to compete with
Y! Answers
Wiki Answers
Google Answers
This Could Be HUGE! Answers
etc….
Interesting concept but not new.
Askpedia.com has been doing it for some time now with mixed success.
Check it out at http://www.askpedia.com
This idea failed in all other places, big and small.
You will have to be focused around this service if you want to make it work. Mahalo is doing a number of things, hence I don’t see this service, or company, scales.
So, Mahalo Answers.
Imagine if Apple decided to try and launch the 3G iPhone to compete with Sprint’s Samsung Instinct, as opposed to competing directly with the 2G iPhone? The point here is that Mahalo Answers is not doing anything new and exciting like Apple has done with the iPhone, nor is there enough radical differentiation to warrant brand loyalty or quality of content. It’s trying to take on the big dog (Yahoo! Answers) as it is really no different than that web portal, plus a virtual currency. Yes, millions of people are attracted. Have you been to Yahoo! Answers? Something tells me that all these Q&A sites are in trouble moving into 2009 and beyond. It will take a great product/service, (brilliant) team, fantastic strategy and a receptive user/member base.
So, Mahalo Answers. Lot of cash…yes. Lot of time to get it right…let’s see :).
Mahalo’s a giant fail. They’re now just copying Yahoo.
I can’t speak for Mahalo Answers, but at Yedda we do plan to continue and challenge Yahoo Answers with its 154 million monthly unique visitors worldwide.
Our model is less ComScore-friendly, as ComScore can’t really count Yedda’s 200+ million monthly Q&A widget impressions on 150+ partner sites. But we can live with that
As for Mahalo Answers, welcome aboard Jason - Q&A is fun
Way to copy Yahoo!!! The category links and the profiles are almost exact copies.
Amazon’s Askville acted like they were gonna implement a rewards program associated with their Quest Gold points system which would be redeemed at Questville.com. It was supposed to launch by the end of this year. They just posted on the blog saying . . .
“Finally, due to the growing needs that we have in supporting Askville, coupled with our limited resources, we have indefinitely postponed Questville until further notice. We apologize for any inconveniences this will cause anyone, but this will allow the team to stay focused on building a great community on Askville.”
Meant to leave a link for that Askville blog post above . . . http://askville.typepad.com/as.....pdate.html
This is quite honestly one of the worst ideas to come out of Web 2.0 (i loathe that term by the way, can we please find a new one).
Let’s see…this “pay-to-play” (thanks Blagojevich!) theory has been tested and ultimately disproven. Does Mr. Calcanacananaicisnanis-not-gonna-work-here-anymore-anyway not remember “google answers”, “live search”, that crappy site that paid bloggers to blog about commercial products, etc, etc, etc, etc……
This thing we’ve got here, the “inter-webs” its full of free things, like advice and answers… it is not the psychic hotline. People will not pay for answers that they can get for free (legally, I mean we’re not talking napster here) on the net.
Though one might be inclined to agree that Internet users are inherently lazy, it is a physical laziness that is typically being referred to rather than a Internet search laziness. These apathetic web-loafers surf the information highway for hours…its part of the joy of doing so. Thus, I can only assume their flat bottoms won’t suffer from what Mr. Calcanaanaananisaisa would like others to believe is a severe case of
“ass-flattening-search-fatigue”.
Mr. Calcanananisaasisa…I give you 6, maybe 9 months before this “revenue model” crumbles under the weight of its own bullshit.
I thank you and your investors hate you.
Peace,
In da middle east!
This “strategy” (if you can even call it that), has the nasty smell of desperation, which by all accounts is a desperate cologne, and in this case Mahalo stinks of it!
You have GOT TO BE kidding me? Pay for search? Are you seriously?
That’s a sad and very lame business plan…
Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, like at Yahoo Answers or WikiAnswers