You choose the best answer based on the ones you get. Only the best answer gets any money. If there aren't any good answers you don't pay anyone and you get either a credit for another question or a refund after (say) 10 business days.
I've given my answer to the freeriding problem above: upfront payment, moderation, rep systems...
Re: 100 people answering the same questions: I don't think that would be that big a problem, because questions are going to be specific. Take my use case scenario: at any given point on Twitter, there might be 100 people willing to answer questions about restaurants in Paris -- but about sushi places in a specific neighborhood? Much less likely.
This sounds very similar to Aardvark (www.vark.com), which already does much of the same thing. In fact, it seems to have a pretty impressive question classifier, and uses it to learn which topics you're good at to personalize questions you receive to your interests.
You might need invites to try it out? I have a few, drop me a line if you want one.
Aardvark can take several minutes to get you an answer though - but usually answers are above 140 characters, which has its pluses :)
Yes, I know it's similar to Aardvark and other services (particularly in Asia), which I consider a plus: it means the concept's got a future. Just because someone is doing it doesn't mean it can't be a great business for Twitter -- quite the contrary. After all, Google was the _second_ company to let people bid for CPC text ads next to search results...
It's an interesting concept - but I'm still apprehensive about it. I mean, you are talking about two non-trivial things that are currently well outside Twitter's competencies:
- creation of (yet another) online currency and (yet another) micropayments platform.
- a "matchmaking" platform that's completely unlike the "following/follower" system that Twitter has going right now.
The question at this point would be: why Twitter? Since the question doesn't go out to your followers (rather, to the general public), and since the response system is unlike Twitter feeds at all... what makes this a "Twitter" idea? This completely fails to integrate with their present service offerings. You won't be able to leverage much (if any) of their existing technology... I don't see a compelling reason for this to be a Twitter thing to do, as opposed to another startup (like, say, Vark?)
Those are all good points but I think it can work for Twitter because it's the only service that's:
- Real time;
- Accessible from anywhere; and
- With a huge userbase already.
I realize it would be a huge engineering endeavor for them. That said, as I mentioned in the article, if they don't go the "Twitter dollars" route they can go through a third party like PayPal's new open API or Amazon, which would make things easier.
You have to keep both the questioners and the answerers from gaming the system. Questioners could say that none of them are good answers, and answerers could just give crap answers. How do you solve this?
For questioners: you pay the money upfront, when you post the question. Once you have the answers, since you've already paid, psychologically speaking, it's going to be more difficult to stiff the answerer, since you've already accomplished the act of paying and you've already "mentally" parted with the money.
Obviously plenty of people _will_ try to game the system, and it's based on the premise that "people are basically good." That was the premise behind eBay, and they still built a pretty good business out of it. Plenty of people try to game the system, but still the vast majority of transactions go off without a hitch, and it's a multibillion dollar business.
Plus there would be a kind of moderating system, possibly crowdsourced. You could complain if you gave a good answer and got stiffed. People who stiff too many people could be banned from using the service (and possibly wouldn't get their money back).
Seems like a good solution. But what happens when no one answers your question? Then some guy can just come by and say "ZEEP SHEEP HEAP" and get all your money. How do you choose nothing over him?
Twitter.com provides the entire Twitter infrastructure, but only a mildly popular front-end application. They should focus on selling their infrastructure (i.e. cloud computing). I'm sure there would be tons of people interested in their real-time search pipeline.
I think people will be unwilling to pay at all, or the price will be driven so low that it is negligible. I can only think of a handful pay-for-answers services, and all of them have failed.
Furthermore, 140 characters is quite a restriction. By allowing only simple questions, the payments will be respectively low. Getting 10% of $0.10 questions isn't a way to make money - even at high volumes. They could have easily used their large user base for something that is much more profitable.
I don't believe Twitter has problems thinking of monetization methods. It's a specific problem where they want to 1) not alienate their existing users, 2) scale to their entire user base or large subset of their user base, 3) and make enough money that it's worthwhile. The sheer scale of the number of users makes it difficult to navigate, since any change will probably piss off large groups of users (look at fb, and the recent @reply fiasco).
Personally, I don't feel like a premium answers system will fulfill 1) or 3).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] threadAlso, what if you WANT to pay out to multiple people? What if multiple answers were best?
Also, if you know 100 people are going to answer, what is the sense in answering if only the best answer gets any money? What are your chances?
Re: 100 people answering the same questions: I don't think that would be that big a problem, because questions are going to be specific. Take my use case scenario: at any given point on Twitter, there might be 100 people willing to answer questions about restaurants in Paris -- but about sushi places in a specific neighborhood? Much less likely.
You might need invites to try it out? I have a few, drop me a line if you want one.
Aardvark can take several minutes to get you an answer though - but usually answers are above 140 characters, which has its pluses :)
- creation of (yet another) online currency and (yet another) micropayments platform.
- a "matchmaking" platform that's completely unlike the "following/follower" system that Twitter has going right now.
The question at this point would be: why Twitter? Since the question doesn't go out to your followers (rather, to the general public), and since the response system is unlike Twitter feeds at all... what makes this a "Twitter" idea? This completely fails to integrate with their present service offerings. You won't be able to leverage much (if any) of their existing technology... I don't see a compelling reason for this to be a Twitter thing to do, as opposed to another startup (like, say, Vark?)
I realize it would be a huge engineering endeavor for them. That said, as I mentioned in the article, if they don't go the "Twitter dollars" route they can go through a third party like PayPal's new open API or Amazon, which would make things easier.
For questioners: you pay the money upfront, when you post the question. Once you have the answers, since you've already paid, psychologically speaking, it's going to be more difficult to stiff the answerer, since you've already accomplished the act of paying and you've already "mentally" parted with the money.
Obviously plenty of people _will_ try to game the system, and it's based on the premise that "people are basically good." That was the premise behind eBay, and they still built a pretty good business out of it. Plenty of people try to game the system, but still the vast majority of transactions go off without a hitch, and it's a multibillion dollar business.
Furthermore, 140 characters is quite a restriction. By allowing only simple questions, the payments will be respectively low. Getting 10% of $0.10 questions isn't a way to make money - even at high volumes. They could have easily used their large user base for something that is much more profitable.
I don't believe Twitter has problems thinking of monetization methods. It's a specific problem where they want to 1) not alienate their existing users, 2) scale to their entire user base or large subset of their user base, 3) and make enough money that it's worthwhile. The sheer scale of the number of users makes it difficult to navigate, since any change will probably piss off large groups of users (look at fb, and the recent @reply fiasco).
Personally, I don't feel like a premium answers system will fulfill 1) or 3).