Yahoo Answers turns one today. The company will hold a celebration at its campus in Sunnyvale to celebrate how far they’ve come. In one year, Yahoo Answers has had 60 million users and 160 million answers.

Along with the party, Yahoo is publishing data from a Harris Interactive survey, showing how people are using online Q&A sites like Answers. The survey shows that one in three online adults have used a Q&A site, and of these, half say that information from a Q&A site has influenced a decision they have made.

According to the Harris survey, 55 percent of adults would prefer to have their questions answered from a group of individuals rather than an individual response from a friend or family member. And of course, users indicated that that they’d prefer the answers forum to be free with 81 percent saying that they would look to the Internet for answers if the service was free and 77 percent saying that they would look to the Internet if they knew they would receive instantaneous responses.

For this data, Harris surveyed 2,303 adults between November 27 and 29, which, ironically, is the same day that Google announced that they would close their answers program.

A company called BitWine launched an interactive search site about three weeks ago. It is much like Ether in that it is a call-an-expert service, except BitWine is integrated with Skype. In fact BitWine will be a Skype plugin when Skype 3.0 launches, which will likely be in early 2007.

With BitWine, users deem themselves experts in specific categories and establish their per-minute consulting fee. Then when another curious user needs an answer about a given topic, they can browse the experts in that category, select someone whose price and expertise they prefer, and Skype them live. As soon as the transaction is over, the “expert” is paid via PayPal.

We spoke with BitWine co-founder Alon Cohen today, trying to figure out why this site is necessary and how it is different than Yahoo! Answers or Google Answers.

“When you look at Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, you don’t really know who is answering because it’s chat based and text based,” Cohen said. “For instance, I asked a question last night and I had to rephrase the question three times for people to understand me. One question and one answer is usually not enough. You need a visual conversation with someone you trust.”

On BitWine, experts get ratings based on their consultancy performance. Cohen sees this as a way for people to make money in their spare time off of their random hobbies. After all, where else are you going to sell your consulting services on model ship making or knitting?

Sites like this really are only as good as their community size. What good is an “operators are standing by” scenario, when no one is calling in?

“This is a big issue that we have many concerns about: the chicken and the egg,” Cohen said. “You want experts there to begin with and you want enough traffic there so that the experts will stay.”

He said the company will target experts through blogs and discussion forums and also attempt to create affiliations with other Web sites’ questions pages.

BitWine was founded by Cohen, who was previously the co-founder of VocalTec, a VoIP company, and Elad Baron, who recently sold his company, Whale Communications, to Microsoft.

The wildly successful Yahoo! Answers is moving to take its global community of user shared knowledge to the next level with today’s release of an API for outside developers interested in accessing the huge Yahoo! Answers site. The company says there are now 30 million plus answers in the system, from amusing ones to useful ones. Answers has also got an intensely loyal userbase.

Developers will be able to access YA data by user, search keyword, or category. The company says the API is almost identical to the interface used internally to create the recent Yahoo! Messenger/ Yahoo! Answers combo and the flash badge that Yahoo! offers.

The Yahoo! Messenger plug-ins program has seen some amazing things developed. It will be very cool to see if developers can make good use of this newest API.

See also our profile of Yedda, a similar service with a big 2.0 twist and today’s announcement of the new Facebook API.

Yahoo! Answers unveiled a new promotion today called “Ask the Planet,” where celebrities, notables and allegedly interesting people will pose questions that users will answer for a chance to win prizes. The celebrity line up is high-profile and should garner a lot of attention.

Questions will be posed to users by the following:

• Marilyn vos Savant, the holder of world’s highest IQ, begins the promotion today with a question about the best way to help kids in school.
• Friday through Sunday will be your chance to answer a question from Donald Trump, in exchange for a $5,000 spending account.
• CNBC’s finance guru Suze Orman’s prize is 3 oz of pure gold.
• Click and Clack, or Tom and Ray Magliozzi from NPR’s Car Talk will participate. The prize for their question is free gas for a year. And all you get for Donald Trump’s question is $5,000!
• Arrianna Huffington will pose a query about News and Events, the winner will get a trip for two to DC. Thrilling.
• Al Gore’s question is tied to a free 2006 Prius.
• Stephan Hawking’s social science question gets one person a trip to the Smithsonian.
• Bono will close the event and Yahoo! will donate $25k to his One campaign in honor of the winner.

It’s called Ask The Planet, but the company claims that it is legally prohibited from give prizes to anyone outside the US. That’s liable to raise some ire. In fact, for having a name like that, the campaign seems pretty US centered. Likewise, in the spirit of mass page views – I mean scientific inquiry, it appears that the winners will be selected at random and users are encouraged to offer more replies for greater chances to win. The company plans to plaster ads for the campaign all over the US. None the less, looks like an interesting campaign that’s liable to raise the profile of Yahoo! Answers significantly. Is asking your audience to all throw their answers in a hat the best way to solve the world’s most vexing problems? Call me cynical, but I’m not sure it is.