It has been a week since we first launched our social Q&A platform (AskForAnswer) to the public. Hundreds of people from all over the world have tried out our website. We would like take this opportunity to thank you guys for supporting we teens in developing AskForAnswer.
Many users may this mentality – “Why should I bother creating an account on AskForAnswer and ask a question which may takes up to few hours to be answered? I should have used other websites such as Yahoo! Answers, which involves a much larger community instead.” Well, you’re not wrong. Yes, although Yahoo! Answers has millions of active users, but it has failed to keep up today’s social world. It only provides an avenue for people to ask and answer questions. That’s all. Nothing more than all.
In this post, I’ll share with you guys the ‘5 Reasons Why AskForAnswer Is Better Than Yahoo! Answers’.
Reason 1: AskForAnswer is a REAL social platform
We have to emphasize this again and again that AskForAnswer is a social platform, more social than any other Q&A websites, including Yahoo! Answers, Answerbag, Fluther and Aardvark. With AskForAnswer, you’re able to establish relationships with people in your niche. For example, if you find a particular person who has similar interest with you, you can follow him/her. His or her questions, answers, and activities will then be displayed in your timeline. From there, you’re able to interact with one another.
To be social is crucial because everyone concerns friendships – you help your friends means your friends will help you. On Yahoo! Answers you can help someone, but after which, nothing will change, except higher reputation points. In this case, AskForAnswer is better than Yahoo! Answers because most people prefer social websites to non-social websites.
Reason 2: The core of AskForAnswer is conversation, not education.
Why ask questions? People ask because they want to know something. Instead of merely asking educational questions like “What’s the speed of light?”, you can ask very personal and conversational questions on AskForAnswer too. We try to be different from the rest of the Q&A platforms, so we focus a lot on conversational questions. For example, we encourage users to ask out of the norm questions such as “Has anyone watched the movie Paranormal Activity?” (to all friends) and “Would you like to have a lunch together at Pizza Hut this Sunday?” (to a particular friend). Yes, you really want to know something, but this isn’t merely for educational purposes.
If you were to post ‘weirdo’ questions like “Am I stupid?” on Yahoo! Answers, people (usually strangers) will think that you’re out of your mind. However, you can do so on AskForAnswer. Your friends will encourage and motivate you not to worry about your IQ. As a result, users will receive human questions, and not ‘textbook’ questions grabbed from Wikipedia or Google.
Reason 3: Integration with Facebook and Twitter
As a social platform, AskForAnswer alone cannot do anything because in today’s world, everything is open. So by integrating with large social networks like Facebook and Twitter, users are then able to share their questions to a bigger community. On AskForAnswer, you can sign in with Facebook Connect directly, and your existing friendships on Facebook can be transferred automatically to AskForAnswer without any much hassle. You can post your questions to Facebook or Twitter so that your friends will know and they will answer it.
Yahoo! Answers does not provide any social web integration. Well, the reason is simple. They have a huge community. It’s used to be a success, but what will happen in the future if they don’t do anything on OpenSocial? No one knows. Yahoo! Answers has a 98% of market share among all Q&A platforms, so they need not to think much about integration with other websites.
Reason 4: AskForAnswer is open!
This is important to all developers. We will open our APIs soon! On the day I write this post, we have finished over 50% of our RESTful APIs. It’s a good news for Ruby on Rails developers as you will be able to connect to our API server with Active Resource directly, so that you can operate with AskForAnswer APIs seamlessly, just like you use Active Record in usual. In contrast, Yahoo! Answers currently does not have APIs.
Although Answerbag is the first website that opened APIs, we are still competitive with our social features and more RESTful design. Also, we will develop our IM Bot which is completely built on our own APIs (We will not connect with our own database, we only use Active Resource to communicate, so that we can prove that the functionality of our APIs is complete).
Reason 5: We have the potential to grow
Although we are not incorporated and funded, we still believe that to build a commercial project is the correct direction for us. We don’t want to be non-profit because we have the responsibility to continuously build this project, including our derivation editions for education and collaboration. We are a small team but we can expand easily.
We believe that growing with us together is the correct choice for you! In the future, we will be better and better, and your networks will become larger and larger by simply sharing your knowledge. To beat the 98% market share owned by Yahoo! Answers is not that easy, but we will continue to work hard on it, and most importantly, we teens have the potential, don’t you think so?