Yedda: Taking Web Q&A To Another Level

When Yahoo Answers came out, the serious web commenters poo-pooed. It was a site where regular people asked and answered questions, rather than snarky webizen experts.

As is always the case with insular naysayers, their impact on the success of the service was gigantic. Today, only TWENTY TWO MILLION people per month use the service. Which I think might keep this Yahoo subdomain out of the top 30, though not by much. Yes, that was sarcasm.

With 22 million regular people using this one service, it's natural that other entrants have taken their own approach to carving out a chunk of the curiosity business. And one of the best, in my opinion, is Yedda.com, a service that began in a basement in Israel and was more recently acquired by AOL.

Yedda is, in my view, just as democratic as services like Yahoo Answers, but it recognizes that we, all of us, have particular expertise and are more qualified to answer questions on certain topics than others.



Using these interests and personal knowledge as a starting point, Yedda filters the millions of questions so that you get to see and participate in the ones most relevant to you. Here's what they have to say about themselves on their website:

It's simple and fun to explore and discover We are building Yedda as a fun place to share, explore and discover knowledge - a place where you can connect with people having specialized knowledge or with people of interests similar to yours. Key unique values we’ve put into the user experience of Yedda:

Personalized

There are so many topics out there. At Yedda, we carefully select for you, based on your preferences, the questions and answers that are likely to be of interest to you. And, the more you use Yedda, the better we get at understanding your interests. So go ahead, personalize Yedda to match your interests!

Proactive

We like to think of each question you ask as if it's the single most important question. After all, it probably is to you. Yedda proactively invites relevant people to answer your question and continues to monitor it to make sure you get the best answers as quickly as possible

Smart

Yedda understands what your question or answer is about, and is clever enough to find related questions and answers automatically for you even if they're listed under a different topic.

Dynamic

We've built Yedda to be a dynamic, self-evolving system that adapts itself to the people using it. New topics and associations between topics are created dynamically by the community. Every question you ask or answer contributes to our understanding of what people really care about.

Free

Yedda is a free service! It's FREE because we are powered by the knowledge and the passion of our community. An amazing community of people, just like you, who have gained a lot of knowledge and experience and find great satisfaction in sharing it with others.

So, I went through Yedda, and found the quality of questions and answers pretty high. Now, I also like Yahoo Answers, though I use it more as a way of understanding public opinion on issues. I also like the proactive nature of Yedda farming out questions to self defined experts in those areas. It doesn't GUARANTEE a correct answer, but that's a given if you are using any sort of democratized information tool.

Yedda's traffic is about 700,000 uniques a month according to Quantcast, which is a lot smaller than Yahoo Answers, but the trend is most assuredly up. Here are the daily figures from Quantcast to show you that nice overall trend:



Anyway. Definitely give it a try. The people on the site are simultaneously knowledgeable and helpful -- and what better combination could there be for a service like this.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.