Twitter is now a core tool of user communication, and every new startup indisputably has every right to think out of the blue to develop a mashup from it in order to improve the existing Twitter user experience. In a time of such a Twitter fad, there is a new mashup called ToAnswer and its current offering has every opportunity to explode a new market for them.

On the landing page of ToAnswer, it said this new mashup is a Web app that trying to work as something more or less like a Yahoo! Answers meets Twitter. As a Twitter user, you simply log on to your account, and use the following format, i.e. @ToAsk, and you can instantly pose a question to the Twitterverse. A typical example that ToAnswer given is: @ToAsk Are there any good pizza joints in downtown Los Angeles? Wait for few seconds, your question will be posted in the Twitterverse, and if someone, a Twitter user saw it, and would like to give you a favor, she/he can help you with an answer in the following format, i.e. @ToAnswer [question id]. Note that question id is the identity number of your question in the ToAnswer’s system.

From a user perspective, the decisions about using it must take into account the number of followers in one’s Twitter account. If you’re a Twitter user with a heavy loaded of followers, from few thousands onward, you post a question and instantly your followers will reply to your message, you won’t feel the need to use this ToAnswer. However, if you’ve a handful number of followers, and want to get more value out of Twitter, try this ToAnswer, you’ll realize the power of the Twitter community. Likewise, if one Twitter user desperately want an advice to her own personal problem, try to answer her question and give her a helping hand. In this way, we can make our world a better tomorrow. This is an ultimate aim of developing a Web app, I wish I’m the one who thought of this great idea and developed this application

The other day I came across a Web 2.0 called Rogomo that helps provide live expert services and charge by minute has launched in public beta. It works exactly like Yahoo! Answers, Baidu Zhidao, Google Answers (shut down in November 2006) and Yedda. Though I feel that this Q&A Web 2.0 has limited appeal, but it definitely takes advantage of openness (can be viewed from the experts’ profile pages) and convenience, i.e. Users are free to choose to communicate via the phone, Internet video, instant messaging (IM), online collaboration tools or any other method they wish.

Rogomo was indeed a project started by three former executives from AOL a year ago, with two co-founders attached to law firms. My sense is that the co-founders believed that professional service has a price tag, if a user want to get a right answer or advice quickly, especially real-time or personalization involved, she must pay for the service. The establishment of Rogomo has thus became a first step toward an online marketplace that they perceived, allow a user to buy or an expert to sell her advice over the Internet. As stated in the above, the expert advice is to be charged by minute, whereby users can browse through all the experts’ profile pages according to categories. Both parties can agree to a fee and the fee is to be calculated according to the time consumed by each professional service, and the experts can offer her advice via the methods such as phone, IM, and etc. At the time of my writing, there are more than 1,100 minutes sold.

Rogomo is viewed as a company that based on the pay-per-answer model. Though this business model is failed as witness by the shut down of Google Answers, but users should expect that they’ll achieve incremental value because the combined expert and her expertise will deliver a much better advice than any of the free Q&A services that they could get on the Web.

I came across a news that Google has decided to abandon its answers services. According to Google’s official blog, it wrote, “Later this week, we will stop accepting new questions in Google Answers, the very first project we worked on here. The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months.

Google Answers was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users. We’ll continue to look for new ways to improve the search experience and to connect people to the information they want.”

As I analyze why this action has been taken by Google, There are several clues that have prompted Google to shuts its answers services down.

1) The pay-per-answer model is failed. With Google oversell its search capabilities, people tend to search an answer on the Web through its search engine rather than paying them a fee from the range of US2 to as high as US200. On the other hand, Yahoo!’s Answers services doesn’t charge money. Instead, Yahoo! appeals to the vanity of smart people to ferret out the answers for them. Yahoo! has thus capitalize the concept of Web 2.0 and currently they have created a community members of over 65 million answers (up-to-date) all around the world.

2) Google Answers ranked low amongst all the available Google domains. According to the Hitwise Intelligence’s blog posting, Google Answers did not gained popularity amongst Google’s varied services, it has only 0.09% of market share and ranked as No. 14 as at 5/13/06. This considered as an unpopular Google subdomain to the public, as Hitwise Intelligence showed their analysis in the chart below:

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/05/google_properties_understandin.html

3) It really is remarkable how badly Google Answers is doing against Yahoo! Answers. Frankly, I never would have thought that. As another Hitwise Intelligence’s blog posting, it wrote, “At present, Yahoo! Answers is over 50x the market share (in visits) of the new Live QnA and 24x of Google Anwers.” In this blog posting, they also provided a chart that represent the current market share gained by the aforesaid players.

Source: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/11/charting_answers.html

4) It seems the Google Answers did not successfully integrate with the Google’s search strategy, with the acquisition of Writely, JotSpot, and iRows, I expected they would likely to concentrate their synergy toward some other projects that may work well for them.

5) My sense is that Google is more “robotic, machine-like” company, but in contrast Yahoo! has created a sense that they look more “human”, no doubt the chances Yahoo! to be succeed in the fields of social search, or some other services such as answer services is much higher in the market.

I wish Yahoo! Answers good luck. Stay tuned.