For the Answers to Tweeted Questions Check Your InboxQ
posted Saturday Aug 27, 2011 by Jon Wurm
Earlier this month we said hello to heello who intern said hello to Twitter. Now we're looking into InboxQ, a service that looks to help make Twitter useful instead of directly competing with it.
Some of you may be familiar with Answerly and the Q&A products they have produced over the past several years. The San Fransisco based company, now called InboxQ, managed to obtain funding from VC, Trinity Ventures and two Angel investors last year. As a result, on the 26th of August they debuted their newly focused Q&A product which is meant to link up "experts" who use Twitter and Twitter users who pose questions that are mostly ignored, according to InboxQ. I try to ignore most things that involve Twitter but you wouldn't know it because I write about them all the time.
To see if InboxQ will answer the cry of 100,000 daily ignored questions, hit the break.
InboxQ's 5 man team has managed to find 1 million "experts" on a myriad of subjects and listed them in their service. What criteria defines an expert seems to have been decided internally and might need some refinement based on the photos below. If you find an expert and want to communicate with them simply click the Ask button or tweet them directly with @mentions.
To put it to the test I decided to ask the most important question of all, "what is the meaning of Twitter?" Apparently, the best person to answer this question, in all of Twitter, is Heather Mews who, as of writing this article, has not responded, meaning things are already looking bad for InboxQ. I do know one thing however, if the answer isn't 140, I'll be genuinely disappointed.
In case you were wondering an InboxQ tweet might look something like this,
InboxQ says you are the most qualified person to answer, "What is the meaning of Twitter?" I eargerly await your reply.@Hev206 via @inboxq
In my opinion the way Twitter is designed doesn't really allow for easy explanations to most questions, especially when you're limited to 140 characters (that number is reduced even further with @username via @inboxq tagged onto the end). I suppose the expert could link to a blog or website but at that point it's just easier to do a Google search to save some time and frustration.
Finding real experts must be like gold mining. They have to sift though several tons of dirt to find one ounce of gold. If they figure out how to do that then maybe there's a chance this could work but as of right now, it seems they've haven't struck enough gold.
