Yesterday, Yahoo was in the news for its plans to add a VoIP component to Y! Messenger which I didn’t write about because I’ve grown weary lately of all the “it’s coming in 2006″ stuff. When these things actually launch, then maybe I’ll write about them. Frankly by the time this does get here it will be the type of feature that everybody else that matters already has — it’s already that way — so Yahoo playing catch up isn’t that enthralling to me, sorry. In fact, I think it’s a bit sad with so many great article, posts, tutorials, etc that a company saying they will come out with something later can dominate the news (that is, tech news, the rest of the news world was focused on the air marshal shooting). I’m going to try and make less trips on the it’s coming in 2006 train. Try.

Today, however, Yahoo has released something, and it’s called Yahoo Answers. Where regular people can use up to 110 characters to ask other regular people — not a machine — questions for free.

Jeremy explains:

Personally, I usually just write up a blog post or use our internal “random” mailing list at work. It takes almost no time to send spam (err, I mean “email”) to hundreds of coworkers who are willing to read and occasionally respond to seemingly random questions. But most people don’t have ready access to such a group. That’s what Yahoo! Answers was designed for.

I decided to ask last night’s burning question: What makes Seinfeld so funny? This was submitted at 7:33 am PST. Oops, got to sign into Yahoo first. Then have to answer a few questions like which icon to use (the one from Yahoo 360, I chose), what nickname to display and what email address to notify when someone answered my question. After that, fortunately the system was smart enough to remember what I typed in and took me to a more detailed and less simple page where I could optionally add details, categorize the question and choose whether or not I wanted to be email notified.

A list of don’t community guidelines was linked for the details section which basically boils down to: ask legitimate and legal questions, don’t use it as an opportunity to promote non-Yahoo sites. Read it for more details, but that’s the gist.

I tried to choose the category/subcategory combination: “Entertainment & Music -> Television” and the system kept returning the following message:

Pick a category, your question can’t find a home all by itself.

WTF? Then I thought, maybe this is an Opera problem, because I was using Opera and decided to fire up Internet Explorer (IE) instead.

Had to work in IE, right? So I fired up IE and then it asked me for my Yahoo password again, and then after I entered it, again, even though it recognized me in LAUNCHcast (with IE) and Yahoo 360 (with IE). Too much time entering in my Yahoo password when the sessions aren’t talking to each other on the browser. If I’m already signed into the same browser for a different Yahoo service then why is it asking me for my password again in the same browser? I understand the cookie issue not traversing multiple browsers, but I don’t understand the cookie issue on the same browser — that’s just shoddy programming.

Back to the IE browser and copy/paste the information entered into Opera.

That was it! This time when I pressed preview, it showed the Entertainment & Music > Television category for my question and allowed me to press submit. The success message:

You will be notified via email when someone answers your question. Your question will be kept open, accepting answers for 14 days. During the 14 days, please come back and choose the best answer among all the answers posted. Or, you can ask others at Yahoo! Answers to vote on the answers received.

14 days, huh? It felt like 14 minutes just to get through the process to ask the question. Immediately I went to the feedback form to tell them that it doesn’t work with Opera. Submitted the following feedback with the “Suggestion for Improvement” dropdown selected:

Answers doesn’t work completely with Opera browser. When you get to the category part, it won’t accept any category, no matter which one you select.

Result? It spun around forever and finally timed out in the browser. C’mon Yahoo this is just amateurish. Are we the collective basic functionality and feedback testers now? Jeremy, what gives? I understand getting beta out so you can get people to tell you what you think, but shouldn’t you make sure that at least the feedback form and authentication works?

BTW, there was no choice for “bug report” in the feedback form, which clearly there is a bug with Opera and the authentication. The system asking for a user’s password twice — two successive screens — cannot be intentional.

Ok, enough of the question side, which currently works if you have lots of patience, time and the right browser, let’s look at the answer side. I stayed in IE for this one. Can’t be all about take and not give, so I decided to try and answer a couple questions questions. I chose the Computers & Internet -> Programming & Design category.

Answering questions is a matter of clicking a button, typing the answer, adding sources if applicable, previewing and submitting. This process went much smoother. I noticed I received points for answering questions. I started at Level 100 with 100 points and after answering 2 questions I had 114 points and was still at Level 1. These levels determine how much participation you can have with Yahoo Answers every day. The following page explains the levels with Level 1 having the following access: 10 questions, 10 answers, 10 votes and 10 ratings every day. To get to Level 2 you need 250 points, and then it steps up to 20 each every day. 1,000 points will get you to Level 3, 2,500 for Level 4 and to reach an unlimited number of questions and answers every day you need 5,000 points. You get 1 point for each login to Yahoo answers, so if you set as your home page and never asked, answered or rated you’d get to unlimited status (level 5) in 13.4 years. If you go with the 10/10/10 formula every day and write good answers chances are good you’d get to that 5,000 points fairly quickly.

Rewards
Looks to me like if the answer involved information on one of your websites, and wasn’t spammy there might be some traffic love, but that’s a dicey area (see the community guidelines). More likely the reward is satisfaction of helping others and learning something new.

The first answer I wrote was picked as “the best answer” and I got 10 bonus points, woohoo. If one got a 10 of those every day, that would be 100 points in itself, of course the likelihood of every answer being the best answer is pretty small, I’d imagine. I must have just got lucky.

Yahoo Answers reminded me immediately of Wondir, also free. Some readers might recall my brief curiosity with Wondir revolved around their proposed method of paying people for their time sort of a la epinions. but upon closer inspection that was a coming soon feature. Not sure if they had ever implemented that but I recall their question interface to be faster and simpler than Yahoo Answers.

Technical issues on the question part aside, these Q&A systems are win-win-win situations as long as enough knowledgeable people get involved and the answers are accurate. They can also consume a lot of time if one isn’t careful. What would be really cool to see is Yahoo incorporate the best of these Q&A into their search results. That marriage of relevant information could prove quite useful. Is that the endgame?

• Google fares better than Yahoo and MSN in Trivial Pursuit challenge
• Yahoo Answers integration to regular search begins
• Use your crystal ball to make 85 cents at Predictfy
• Amazon’s enters Q&A field with Askville (beta), Questville coming in 2007
• Google puts brakes on Google Answers
• Humans For Sale calculates your value as a human being