The Downside

I guess Bezos is getting tired of the ecommerce biz - Amazon has just released their Askville Social Q&A service, a competitor to sites like Yahoo Answers, MSN Live QnA, and my own Answerbag(which predates all of them, incidentally. Not being snippy, just pointing it out so the title of this post doesn’t sound hypocritical.)

I suppose for Amazon it’s opportunistic - they saw it work at Yahoo Answers, so they did it themselves, and they have enough traffic already to make almost any social service work. (I won’t pretend that they were imitating Answerbag, the smaller, nimble competitor!) The bummer is that they really didn’t add much to the concept.

It works essentially the same way as Yahoo Answers and MSN’s service, but it’s actually even more limiting - when someone asks a question, only 5 people can give answers, and then those five people are the only ones who can evaluate the answers and decide which one is the best. Why the limits, guys? Server too small? Wouldn’t having more people evaluate your answers make them better? Wouldn’t allowing more people to PROVIDE answers result in better answers? According to their site:

We’ve placed a limit on the number of answers per question to make sure you are not overwhelmed with too many answers to your question. If you want to get more than 5 answers you can simply ask your question again – it’s free!

They’re probably right. Six answers is just too many for my feeble brain to process. Thank you for giving me that limit, and encouraging me to ask the question again if I really, really want a sixth answer.

One more thing, you can’t see the answers until all five have been posted, so you may end up posting the exact same answer someone else already gave, and you won’t know until the question gets five answers. Another bummer about that is if your question doesn’t get answered, it gets deleted. You have to come back and ask again. Seems like a pain.

I will give them credit for Map Answers - neat idea, and it was implemented well. They do Video Answers (as Answerbag does), but for some reason don’t do Image Answers. And, of course, they let you embed Amazon product listings in your answers, if you happen to be eager to help a struggling ecommerce company hawk their wares.

I could go on, but I am far too biased to make this post sound objective at all. I have nothing against Amazon as a company and in general I like their stuff and I’ve even found inspiration from various features of their main site. But this time…c’mon guys - let’s innovate a little!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 12:14 am and is filed under Internet, Marketing, Social Q&A. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.