Amazon has two Q&A services in quiet development. Nownow and Askville each attempt to answer people’s questions in their own way.
Askville is a web based service that allows users to ask and answer each other questions. Users can earn points within the system for asking questions as well as answering them. Best answers are chosen by the group of question asker and answerers, where the asker gets one more vote than the answerers This service is very similar to Naver’s Knowledge Search, Wondir, Yahoo! Answers and Live QnA. Askville rewards users with “coins,” a virtual currency that will be redeemable in another community named Questville slated for release in early 2007.
NowNow is a mobile question-answer service that has a new twist on it. It is going to use Amazon’s own Mechnical Turk to handle the answers. It is free during the testing phase. The service is currently in closed Beta. Check the NowNow FAQ for more info.
Thanks to O’Reilly’s Brady Forrest (who will be sponsoring an Ignite Seattle non-conference tech-gathering event Dec. 7th) for this scoop!
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