Search engines are all well and good, but sometimes you have a burning question that flummoxes typical Internet search services. Times like that, you might sometimes wish you could just ask an expert—since you know there has to be one out there on the Internet somewhere. That’s what Amazon.com‘s new Askville service is all about: matching up questions with people who can answer them.
“Finding information or getting good advice is hard enough when you are searching the Internet by yourself,” said Joseph Park, Director of Askville.com. “Askville.com allows you to ask a question to a community of users who are willing to help you find that information or give you advice from their own personal experiences, which makes the discoverability of information much more efficient. Plus, it is a lot more fun interacting with real people versus looking at a list of Web site links from a search engine.”
Although Askville has been bubbling along in beta form for almost a year—and born out of projects like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—Amazon today threw open the service’s doors to all Amazon customers and anyone else in the U.S. and Canada who wants to authenticate themselves via mobile phone. Askville users can post questions to the larger Askville community, who in turn can post their answers. For a limited time, folks who both ask and answer questions on Askville receive “Quest Gold,” a sort of point system that, for a limited time, Amazon will let users redeem for gift cards, Askville t-shirts, or mugs. The amount of Quest Gold a user earns if tied to how well they answer questions and levels of expertise they’ve demonstrated with particular topics. Eventually, Amazon plans to launch another site called Questville where users will be able to spend their Quest Gold on activities and other rewards.
