Thursday, October 19, 2006

Amazon Askville

Amazon released a Question & Answers site of their own called Askville. Currently in invite-only Beta, the site looks cleaner than Yahoo Answers, and as opposed to Google Answers, you don’t need to pay to ask questions. Activity on the site – like asking a question, or answering one – is rewarded with “quest coins” which can later on be spent in Questville (Questville didn’t open yet!).

Amazon’s doing a lot of sites unrelated to shopping (A9, and then there’s all their APIs), and this is one of those. As expected, you can use your existing Amazon account to log-in, and I’m curious to see how much of a community they’ll be able to assemble in the long run.

Here are a couple of screenshots from the site:

• The homepage, where you can start asking a question, or browse current questions from others.
• Asking a question in detail, and adding tags.
• Browsing the answers to a question (weird, but the question details are hidden by default).
• Answering a question using Amazon’s rich-text editor (you can also attach gadgets like maps or videos to your answer).
• The profile page where you can adjust your settings (like your avatar image).
• The Questville ... is coming soon, Amazon says. Right now, Questville.com is redirecting to another Amazon Q&A site, NowNow.com.

To receive and share invites, join the chat room. Just ask for an invite (and tell your email address), and when you received one please stick around in the room to invite others, too.

[Via Waxy. Thanks to the Overstated blog for the invite!]

Amazon Askville by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (8)

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