Amazon wasn’t going to stay on the sidelines in the Question and Answer race. Competing against Yahoo Answers, Microsoft Live QnA and others comes Askville (beta). My wife received an invite with the following message:

You’re Invited! As a valued Amazon customer, you’ve been specially picked to get an early look at a new website called Askville where you can ask any question on any topic and get real answers from real people. It’s new, and best of all, it’s free!

My wife shops regularly at Amazon and indicated last week during our weekly live web radio show that she does some 90%+ of our Christmas shopping online (and primarily through Amazon). It’s nice to see Amazon show some love to their regular customers. She didn’t seem to have much interest in Askville, so she sent along the invite to me to check out and write about the experience. First, the website:

I clicked on the beta invite code and was prompted to login with my Amazon account. I used my account that’s also attached to our Amazon Associates (affiliate program) account. I was a bit surprised to see that I had to confirm the new account signup with a text message verification code.

This immediately made me wonder what do people do that don’t have cell phones? Also, they have our bank information on file attached to this account, why do they need additional confirmation? I proceeded to enter in our cell phone number and wait for the verification text message code. About five minutes later it arrived:

I entered in the verification code and then added a profile pic. Next, I searched around for a question to answer. One of the most recent questions asked about a boy ever being able to swim as fast as a shark. I did a little poking around in Google and learned that the fastest shark was clocked at 43mph. Not unless somebody grows fins will they be out swimming a shark. I added my answer and then noticed the ability to add widgets to support my answer.

Widgets can contain video, links to Amazon products or maps. I was curious if I linked up an amazon product page with our affiliate code if it would pass. This is unofficial and uncomfirmed but it looks like the affiliate code is being stripped looking at the link being generated. If that’s the case and the code isn’t just buried in some encrypted string, then this is a missed opportunity by Amazon. This would allow the possibility of making some actual money by researching an answer. Google Answers offers to pay the researchers for their answers. It can take time to research and put together an answer so it’s nice earning something.

How do you get ‘paid’ for interaction with Askville?
Amazon gives you quest coins — what is this, Super Mario? — for asking and answering questions with the following breakdown:

Great 10
Good 5
Okay 1
Wrong -5
Lame -10

You get one quest coin for logging in each day. The incentive to provide good answers is a best answer bonus of 5 points. You don’t get that unless the winning answer isn’t rated as “great” or “good.”

These coins will be usable at something Amazon is calling Questville that is coming in 2007. It would be cool if this was some sort of Massive Multiplayer Online game with the ability to buy real products through Amazon. Think Second Life Linden Dollars. Remember, this is just heavy speculation on my part.

Profile home page
From your Askville profile page you can navigate to questions you’ve asked, answered and rated or to ask a brand new question. You can also search through topics and see your Askville stats.

Askville vs. the competition
I spent over a month primarily answering questions and beta testing Microsoft’s Live QnA. What I learned during this time is the best chosen answers were usually the most comprehensive ones, providing related, but not spammy source link(s) to back up the answer.

Longer doesn’t necessarily mean better, but it seemed to help. Jokes didn’t go over very well and often were rated down, which means leave your sense of humor at home. Apparently these Q&A areas have a lower tolerance for humor?

I’d like to see somebody come out with a Q&A site which intentionally promotes sardonic wit answers. Best sarcastic answer. Why do answers have to be boring? Yeah, yeah, I know maybe that’s more useful in an librarian-like way and I’m probably in the minority who would appreciate a little more creative freedom, but all the Q&A sites are looking essentially for the same thing (eyeball grab, mindshare) and there aren’t enough point Q&A wizards to go around. Amazon’s biggest weakness is being late to this party, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are already here.

I’ll wait to grade this until it’s out of beta and we find out what these coins can do at Questville. Being that’s at least a couple months away, let’s hope it’s something original and creative. Amazon seems to be catching the most buzz these days with their S3 hosting project.

Askville invite opportunity
We have 25 Askville invites as of this writing to share. If you’d like one to check out Askville, then leave a comment below and an invite will be sent to your email addresss in the comments until all our invites are gone. As we’ve done in other invite threads, we may close comments after the invites are gone to stop other people asking for invites after they are gone, but we’ll see how it goes. Been awhile since we’ve tried this.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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