I agree with you about the Q&A wars shaping up, but I think you should include Fluther, which falls smack dab in the middle of this fray.
It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts), Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.
I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The actual Q&A space is much more vast.
- We've been matching questions using an a sophisticated algorithm since before Aardvark launched.
- We've been using real-time interaction also for years, and more recently added IM notification and chat (not saying I don't think parts of Quora's interface is slick, just we were doing it first).
- We have a large, thriving community and a healthy amount of traffic (around 800k uniques).
- And at the end of the day, we have a lot of smart people giving great answers. Try asking a good question good question.
- Having talked at length with some of the other co-founders, ceos, and investors of these very companies (and others not on the list), I can say pretty confidently, that we are indeed, "in the fray"
Not trying to sound defensive. I love how our company how's grown, where we're going (we have some amazing stuff in store for this year). More I'm saying how it can be frustrating to not get included in discussions like this (which can shape opinion over time) that are written by people who don't actually have serious insight about the space.
Quite frankly, we're a lot more in the "in-crowd" than some of the other Q&A companies, but I don't think that makes them irrelevant.
I wasn't trying to sound offensive. Wanted to soft pitch you something easy to hit because I hadn't heard of Fluther before and as long as you're disclaiming, it would be helpful to know what you're about.
I'm curious about your use of Google custom search, especially given your size. You don't think something more tailored would work better?
All in all, looks like a friendly community, which is no easy feat at scale.
Yeah, something tailored would definitely be better. Google custom search is pretty weak, but it gets the job done for our users until we find the time to improve. We'll probably switch to lucene or solr (with some secret sauce), but we've been too busy with other stuff. I set up a branch with Haystack (we use Django) a few weeks ago and was pretty impressed.
If you want to chat more specifically about search (or something else), you can drop me a line: ben@fluther.com
It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts), Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.
I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The actual Q&A space is much more vast.
Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Fluther.