Yahoo Answers vs. Abuzz
While most of our readers have no idea who Abuzz was, I still feel it’s important to dedicate a small diatribe to who they were, what became of them, and that soft spot in my heart for their service.
When I first started working for New York Times Digital back in 2000, one of their subsidiaries (besides WineToday, GolfDigest and NYToday.com) was a small Internet Start-up called Abuzz. Abuzz was fantastic, the premise: Ask. Answer. Discuss. The idea was that you could go to the site and ask a question about anything in the world (What is the best pizza place in Boston? Where can I get a haircut for under $15? Who was the AL MVP in 1968? I have a strange growth on the back of my knee, should I get it looked at?) and self-proclaimed experts would respond to your inquiries.
Self-proclaimed experts, meaning, users who have signed for the service, turned on their profile to receive broadcast messages and selected certain topics. The Abuzz system used very complicated algoryhtms to determine who was best suited to receive this question based on the user’s profile, the previous questions they answered, how active they were, etc. Then Abuzz would send out an e-mail with the question and a link to the board where the answer-person could then respond or discuss the other answers. Users were even rated on turnarond time, with how fast you typically responded to questions in your realms of knowledge.
The reason I bring this up, is a response to the latest Yahoo product launched today, Yahoo Answers.
Abuzz had everything going for it, it was tightly integrated into Boston.com and NY Times.com, had a large user audience, and a great system that worked very well. Everyone I knew that used the system loved it. Then came Abuzz 2.0.
I remember it was the summer sometime, and Abuzz came to our office to discuss the new changes to the Site and the redesign/re-architecture that they were going through. They were going to make it more dicussion-based and increase the forum aspect rather than focus on the core-competency of asking and answering questions.
After just the first month of the new site, users dropped significantly. The site was difficult to navigate through, and very un-user friendly. It drove people away from it very quickly. In January of 2001, during the first round of Layoffs at NY Times Digital, Abuzz was terminated. The company was dismantled, some employees going to other branches of NYTD while the software was licensed to a few companies who found the software useful for their own internal systems. Even the old hardware was distributed amongst the other subsidiairies of NYTD.
Now, I’ve yet to use the new Yahoo Answers system, but at first glance it appears to be IDENTICAL to the old Abuzz. Even the tagline “Ask. Answer. Discover.” is very reminiscent of the “Ask. Answer. Discuss.” motto of the now-defunct company. The premise is the same — ask questions, and those who are best-suited to answer will receive a notification telling them that there’s a question that is in need of an answer. It’s a great way to create a community on a site, and I think this is great for Yahoo.
It’s a shame what happened to Abuzz. It really is. And the fact that it’s been reincarnated by Yahoo, is just an example of the foresight that this company has when it comes to the future of the Internet. Between Yahoo and Google, we’re in for a crazy ride.
