It’s not a fair comparison at all.  First of all, ToAnswer just started, and Yahoo! Answers has been around for a long time.  But it begs the question: does the world need another quick answer site, and is the basic functionality of the new site in any way superior to the older sites, and so capable of displacing their massive user base?  Or even filling a much needed niche?

Of course, I’m a big advocate of asking librarians questions, but as you may know, a lot of people go to sites like Yahoo! Answers to get quick answers to some of their questions.  So I thought I’d do a little compare and contrast with the systems of the two sites.

First - Yahoo! Answers.

Yahoo! Answers has some interesting social aspects - you build a profile and things like that.  You look at questions people are asking, and answer the ones you think you can answer.  You can cite sources, which appeals to the librarian in me.  A lot of people who answer questions at Yahoo! Answers don’t cite their sources, but then again a lot of the questions being asked there are in the category of ‘what do you think about…’ etc.

Now, I tested ToAnswer about a week ago, and posted three questions:  What’s the best kind of bear?  What are the five platonic solids? and What’s the best Michael Moorcock book for a book club?  Later, when I was examining Yahoo! Answers, I posted the same questions.  This was my first time posting questions on the site - most of my time previously was spent answering questions.  When you answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, you get points.  When someone decides that you gave the best answer, you get bonus points.  When you ask questions, it costs points, thus creating a kind of uneasy balance.  The community helps monitor activity to make sure no one is asking inappropriate things, though the odd questions still roll through from time to time.  There’s a librarian related program that happens periodically called Slam The Boards, where librarians spend a day answering as many questions as they can on sites like Yahoo! Answers.   So.  What kind of responses did I get for my questions?

Within 30 minutes I had an answer to my Michael Moorcock question (A good one, too!).  It took about 3 hours to get an answer to my platonic solid question, but it had a link to a good math page online.  I didn’t have to ask my bear question - someone had already asked it, several times.  So instead i got to look at similar questions and their answers, which were pretty entertaining:

So, even though it takes a few steps to post a question, and you have to earn points answering questions to afford to ask very many questions, once you’ve asked it, it doesn’t take very long to find an answer, either in previously asked questions, or from Yahoo! Answers power users that love getting points for “Best Answer.”  Your question is active for a few days, after which you (the asker) are prompted to pick a best answer.  Questions are categorized, so if you want to answer questions in a limited category, it’s easy to drill down to tackle those - if you wanted to answer questions about the city you live in, for example, or about something that you have a Masters Degree in.

ToAnswer:

ToAnswer works through Twitter, allowing you to tap the collective conscious of the Twitter crowd to answer your questions.  I asked my three questions and waited.  Of my three questions, only one had any answers after six days:

So, the ease of asking the question is offset by the response to those questions, which has been disappointing.  I’m not sure where the answers came from - Twitter, or from the ToAnswer site itself - like, did Twitter users see the question in the global list and decide to answer it? Or did people coming to ToAnswer to see what it was like decide that my funny “Office” joke question was easy to answer?

I’m thinking for ToAnswer to work well, a person would have to have a lot of active followers on Twitter.  The rate the Tweets on the global timeline pass by is pretty fast, so the question could easily get lost in the shuffle pretty quickly.  But if you’re depending on your followers on Twitter to answer questions, then why bother using ToAnswer?  You could just tweet your question in the normal way and wait for a response in a familiar environment.  Any thoughts?  Twitterers out there - is ToAnswer filling a niche for you?

I promised last week to post the results of the SurveyMonkey survey, so here they are, in brief -

51 respondents so far

The first question asked respondents to check boxes next to and social networks that they belong to - certainly not a comprehensive list, but containing some of the major names.  The top three sites were Facebook (79.2%), LibraryThing (60.4%) and Twitter (43.8%).  MySpace was 4th with 39.6%.

The second question asked respondents to pick one that they preferred, or as one commenter pointed out, which one they use the most.  Facebook far outpaced even the closest rivals as the preferred (or most used) of the social networks, with 65.1% of the total.  LibraryThing and Twitter were distant 2nd and 3rd, with 18.6% and 9.3%, respectively.

I included a question about age ranges, but honestly I’m not sure what to do with it.  The whole thing was part demo and part personal interest, and I thought somehow I would be able to correlate ages with preferences, but it doesn’t look like I can do that.  What I have is a nearly bell-shaped curve of respondent age, with the largest contingent being 26-33 (34%), with 46-59 in second with 28%, and 34-45 in third with 20%.

Conclusion - I probably could have included several other relevant questions to help determine other factors involved, such as income, education, and the usual.  I figure the bulk of infodoodads readers are librarians or in library and information related professions, but I could be assuming too much.  It seems that facebook is the clear ‘winner’ in the survey as the online hangout for infodoodads readers, and MySpace (the big main competitor of Facebook) doesn’t appear to hold much interest to infodoodads readers.  I’d say infodoodadders like a range of online social activities, but aren’t interested in repetition - so one large social network (facebook), one fun personal use type diversion thing (LibraryThing) and one quick communication technology (Twitter) are enough.  And really, how much more social can a person be?

I’ll leave the survey up, so if you haven’t weighed in yet, feel free to do so!

Making surveys is fun, and the results can be illuminating. I tried out a survey making tool called Survey Monkey last year, but got bogged down by writing too many questions, and not clearly defining my focus before I started. This time (for this post) I went with just three questions, so I think I’m pretty safe.
Follow the link to take the survey - it took me about 15 minutes to build. I had my choice of many different types of questions, from multiple choice to text answers and in between. If you all go take the survey, I’ll post some answers next week!

Click Here to take survey

When I was writing the survey, I kept looking for a way to save it, but apparently it autosaves everything as you go. To send your survey out when you’ve finished it, click on My Surveys, and choose the “Collect” icon next to it - this will provide you with several means of providing others with a link to your survey. Pretty cool - check it out, if you haven’t already!

In a previous post about drop.io, I lauded the sites virtues, including the ability to fax documents out of the site for free.  I’ve gotten a few comments - here and elsewhere, that the fax services at drop.io seem to be changing, so i went to check it out.  Sadly, it’s true - free faxing is gone, at least for the time being.  Seems there was some abuse.

And I just got done laminating the “How To Use Drop.io For Faxing” sheets for patron use.