If you haven't taken a look at Ask Jelly yet, you've really missed your chance. I'm betting you probably haven't, which may well be one of the reasons that it's closing. Basically it was a Question and Answer service; people would register, indicate their area of expertise and when people asked questions, they would be pushed through to the appropriate person to answer them - for free. The answer would be posted, people would say thanks, everyone was happy.
This type of resource,with the obvious exception of Quora simply doesn't work. We've seen it tried and fail with ChaCha and Mahalo. Back in April 2016 I said that it would fail, and it has - less than a year later. I love the phrase that was used in the email telling us that it was closing: "The spirit of Jelly will continue to thrive within the machinery of Pinterest, but Jelly on iOS and askjelly.com themselves will no longer be standalone services." In other words, we've been bought out and have sunk without trace. These services rely on the ability of people to provide useful, timely and authoritative information, but the people who can really do that are, for the most part, busy doing that in their professional lives. It's great if people want to help other people, but the feeling of satisfaction is generally self created.
It's a shame, but it was obviously going to happen, and if anyone else is foolish enough to try it, their effort will fail as well. Let's move on from this broken model now, shall we?
There's a line out there that basically says a definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different result. If that's the case, then Biz Stone, who was one of the founders of Twitter, is nuts. I wrote about Jelly in January 2014 and said "To be honest, if this had been produced by anyone other than Biz Stone it would have sunk without a trace. Because it's bad. Not only is it bad, it's pointless." I also predicted that it wouldn't last for long. Well, it's back again and it's going to crash again. It's a 'search engine' whereby you ask questions and people out there answer them for you. We have seen this concept time after time after time. Q&A resources seldom work - even my favourite, Quora, isn't mainstream. Mahalo never produced the goods, ChaCha was pointless and Wonder, launched almost a year ago to the day is trying to make a living with paid questions.
The problem with all of these services is many fold. First of all, and let's say this really loudly, and hope that Stone hears - they are not search engines. With a search engine you expect to - you know, search for stuff. With this resource, you type in your query, and hope that someone is going to answer it. That's NOT a search engine. The most that I can do with Jelly is browse through subject categories and hope that I can find something - anything - that matches my interests. Unfortunately, it's unlikely. I managed to find a topic called Internet. These are the kind of questions that I was finding: "what is the average salary for a front-end web developer in Ireland?' 'Which are some good websites to promote indie games that are still in production ?' and 'What's the last wifi technology?' I particularly liked 'What's the best search engine?' with the stunning answer 'Google is great'. Seriously? Dear God, it doesn't get any better.
Another problem of course is 'who are these people?' Not the ones asking the questions, but the ones answering them. I have no idea at all. The guy who said that Google is great had 23 helpful answers. Well, that's alright then, I can certainly trust what he's got to say. Seriously - just go along to Wikipedia and see what other people are saying. Better yet, take any of the questions that have been asked and punch them straight into your favourite search engine and you'll get better and more comprehensive replies instantly.
Jelly was, and remains a total waste of web space. Seriously, seriously bad.
"The opinion social network Simply collect, express and make sense of opinions" Looks very like Quora to me, and since it doesn't appear to offer anything that Quora doesn't, that's the end of my interest I'm afraid. The main difference is the polls aspect, which is great but limited.
I'm always wary when I see phrases such as 'let's sort out the net' because it shows such a depth of misunderstanding it's scary. However, moving on from that, sortpage is claiming that it's going to be able to do just that - with our help, of course. It's an alpha search engine, and at the moment is just concentrating on Apple data, but the idea is that people join and add their own favourite pages (while promoting themselves in the process) to provide more data. Guys - this simply isn't going to work. Not enough people care, and you've already got more than enough data with something like Delicious to play with. It's a great idea, very worthy, and won't be here in 6 months.
True Knowledge "is a pioneer in a new class of search technology that allows you to ask questions on
the web, just as if you were talking to another human being.
Rather than trying to guess keywords to find the information you are looking for, you simply
ask True Knowledge the question you want to ask. Our answer engine does not simply
guess at relevant web pages, but rather understands the meaning behind your question:
drawing inferences and conclusions when needed to find the answer you are looking for. True
Knowledge is tapping subject matter experts around the globe to build its information
repository - bringing together the benefits of machine-driven automation and people-driven
intelligence"
It's clearly best at factual data - how many feet is 60 inches, population of London and so on. It tends to fail, not surprisingly with touchy feely questions, such as 'which is better, a or b?' The answers it gives are reasonable. A search for 'what is twitter' gives straight forward functional information, such as business type, website, email address, wikipedia page and so on. Users can log in and give their own answers as wel, and these can be voted up or down. There are also links to other sites, such as ChaCha, Wikianswers, Answerbag and so on.
I prefer Trueknowledge to ChaCha - the answers are more indepth and factually useful. I asked the question "What is the population of London?" and ChaCha simply said 7,518,000 without any details as to where it got that information. Trueknowledge gave the answer 7,556,900 and linked to london.gov.uk and Wikipedia. This was closer to the figures mentioned on the Mayor of London's site than the ChaCha offering.
However, these are not the only engines that are in this area. The obvious other one which is in the news at the moment is Aardvark which I've used for a long time. It's a nice resource since it allows users to register and list what subject areas they know about. They can also ask questions - Aardvark will then route the question to someone it thinks can answer the question. I've linked mine up to my Google account, and perhaps once a day it pops up in my chat box with a question that I can try and answer or not as I feel inclined. The strength/weakness of the service is of course that it depends on the ability of the person asking the question, so rather than asking factual questions, Aardvark is the place that I'd go for the 'is a or b better?' I've asked questions about vegetarian food and game software, and answered a wide variety, mostly in the internet area.
Of course, if you don't like any of those, you could try Mahalo. I have a personal bias here in that I don't like Mahalo. The ask question element is right at the top of the screen, so you merrily ask the question, categorise it and only then do you get prompted to log in or create an account. I tried searching Mahalo for my London population question and got no answers at all. However, when I asked the question on the home page I had results from Wikipedia and a school website page. Admittedly there were links to news information, images and videos. I had to hunt around in order to get somewhere.
So - a few different engines to try. None of them perfect, but this is the internet, what else can you expect?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=38d7153f-67b2-43c1-9f4a-ab8db2b6302f)
Recent Comments