Got Questions? The Social Web Has Answers.

Tony Zanders

Maybe the San Francisco 49ers settling in Northern California was a foreshadowing. Because in Silicon Valley today, gold rushes are taking place everywhere we turn. This time, the dust seems to be brewing up around a peculiar product: questions and answers. A few clever entrepreneurs have started to get much value out of the things keeping people up at night. While there are other players in the game, including Piazza (Q&A for Educational Institutions), Stack Overflow (Q&A for programmers), and Yahoo Answers, for this article, I’ll be focusing on Formspring, Quora, Hunch, and Aardvark.

Formspring.me (honesty box)

What most people may consider a “fly-by-night” startup has just made a platform where over 700 Million questions have been asked, according to TechCrunch. What Formspring brings to the table is simple, unique, and effective: ask someone a question, provide your identity or stay anonymous, and that person will be notified by email, Facebook, or Twitter when the question is asked. Likewise, you will be notified when it’s answered. My personal favorite about Formspring is the ability to embed the form to ask me questions anywhere I would like to. On my blog, my about page, on Facebook, or on Twitter. This makes it very convenient to share my knowledge without making people uncomfortable with sharing their identity. People can be honest thanks to Formspring.

Quora (answers, alive)

The brainchild of Facebook Co-Founder and ex-employee Adam D’Angelo has come a long way since we gave out 50 invites in an hour in January. Quora has quickly become the de facto location for asking general questions to a community of frankly brilliant people (in my opinion) and being able to follow that question and it’s answers as long as you please. By design, the website is very organic. I say this for three reasons:

1. Upon login, your friends are already there thanks to a handy Facebook Connect implementation.
2. The best answers rise to the top as a result of a voting feature on each answer.
3. The other organic aspect comes in when users are able to recommend other users as subject matter experts in one or many areas.

If you’re not yet on Quora, leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite. You can also read this article we wrote on getting started on Quora. As an early vote of confidence, the company raised $11 Million, placing it at an $86 Million dollar valuation. They’ve also proven to be very smart early on, by giving you ownership over your content at the outset, unlike some companies that happen to be in the news alot lately ;-)

Hunch (recommendation engine)

Design, look and feel, are second to none on Hunch, the social recommendation engine made by the creator of Flickr, and serial entrepreneur Chris Dixon. While hunch isn’t the traditional question and answer forum, it takes a different route to accomplishing the same goal: solutions. Whether you’re trying to figure out a place to eat, or if you have questions about a country you’ve never been to, Hunch takes the best answers from a growing community of users and recommends things to you based on what it learns about you. In a way, Hunch is alive as well. My favorite part about Hunch is the fact that rather than allowing advertisers to spam users with ads at the top right of the screen, they use that real estate to learn more about you. Also, their engine is so smart, that it’s able to mine a person’s tweets to tell you relevant information about them. Check out this example of our friend at Foursquare, Tristan Walker.

Google’s Aardvark (network questioner)

Also known as “Vark!”, this Q&A tool is the clear winner in this race in two areas: mobile and integration. Aardvark’s iPhone app is the only real way to get questions answered by an iPhone application. With a large following gathered by their early integration with email and IM, the debut of the iPhone app almost 9 months ago makes it dead simple to ask questions on the go. In short, Aardvark reaches into your social network (Facebook contacts, Twitter contacts, Phonebook contacts) and your friends’ social networks, to identify who is the best person to answer questions of a certain topic.

For instance, I’m listed in Aardvark as being an “expert” on all things New Orleans (since that’s my hometown), Basketball (Since I’ve been playing for 20 years), and Silicon Valley. If my friend (or her friend) asks a question about Cafe Du Monde, a famous beignet joint in New Orleans’ French Quarter, I will get a “push notification” asking me if I would like to answer her question, since I labeled myself as an expert. That’s one major difference between Aardvark and Quora. On Quora, your friends are the only ones capable of labeling you an expert on a topic.

Facebook Questions (?)

The new kid on the block is the most established company of them all, Facebook. This move probably didn’t catch many by surprise, as many established internet companies secure their existence through adapting to new trends. Facebook’s Questions is still in it’s infancy. Just this month, they have opened it up for development by Facebook users – a first for Facebook. We’ll be watching closely to see how the product develops.