Askville is Amazon’s take on the crowd-sourcing answers idea, much like Yahoo! Answers. The service launched early this year and went into open-beta in the summer.

The ask-and-answer-questions idea is a curious beast. It fits the user-generated content ideal of Web 2.0 and offers two paths for users to participate, that is, in answering and asking questions. It’s a great use of the internet, too. Putting disparate groups of people in touch with one another, using the internet to share knowledge like the liberal meta-place it is meant to be. In practice, though, asking and answering questions online happens in so many different ways that a dedicated website for this seems to make little difference. People can use blogs, im, twitter, forums and even irc as a resource for learning and sharing knowledge. Google ran their own answers service for a while, but closed in December 2006.

Why, then, am I interested in Askville? Because, when I first heard of them at the start of the year, Justin, Merci and I were building PMOG before we’d officially become GameLayers. PMOG was one of only a few browser based games, and as we discussed features for the game, we looked for similar projects for inspiration. Askville, in particular, had a similar theme to one we were toying with, that of questing on the web. Moreover, Askville actively seemed to be pursuing the idea of a web-based RPG and we wanted PMOG to become native to a web of data. All of which, understandably, ticked our boxes. Pressed our buttons. Floated our boats. Etcetera, etcetera.

Answering questions on Askville earns you Quest coins, which in turn, can be spent on a partner website call, get this, QuestVille. By this point, PMOG was up and running as a BBC prototype to promote web literacy. We achieved this by running Quests, a simple sequence of URLs that players could step through in order to complete the task. Quests could teach you about blogging, flash games, cult history, sustainable living or the best cheeses.

Glimpse of the late 2006 version of PMOG - iframe MMO HUD!

The idea of Askville users earning coins for answering questions was analogous to PMOG players passively earning datapoints for web browsing. Again, the idea of Askville users spending their quest coins on the Questville website lined up with PMOG players who could spend their passively earned datapoints on tools like mines and portals, to annotate the web and have fun.

Since then PMOG has gone on to complete a successful beta in its life as a Firefox sidebar extension and we’re now building the new version of a game Merci describes as making us ‘arms dealers to the web’. Askville, though, seems stuck. They have always claimed that Questville was due in 2007, so there is still time for them to launch and hit the deadline, but it seems there are more than a few people asking this question.

Whither Questville, indeed.

Further to this, the format of Questville seems vague and undefined, leading people to speculate that it could be a Shockwave 3D virtual world, or somehow tied to mobile devices. It’s clear that the lack of updates is hurting Askville, but I really hope they launch before the end of 2007. Askville is a friend question-and-answer website, that fits in with the idea of a ‘playful web’ that many people are keen to see developed. Questville, in whatever form it takes, has the potential to make a question-and-answer website that much more successful. Previously, Google Answers took a hefty chunk of any revenue generated by the people who used their website, but Amazon has a massive selection of products with which to (my apologies for this…) incentivize users. Askville could offer a decent reward from a website trusted and used by nigh-on all web users (Amazon) in return for answering the questions on its website. It’s such a great way to encourage a helpful internet, to foster a spirit of sharing and a willingness to help amongst web users, that I really hope Questville launches and succeeds.

And if you’ve ever had the misfortune of reading Youtube comments, then you’ll know that the internet could do with some more helpful, willing users.

Duncan Gough posted this up on Monday, 19 November, 2007 at 21:54 and filed it under Uncategorized. These tags were applied: askville, questville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.