Web 2.0 has certainly changed the way we utilise and browse the WWW, however I have to disagree and do not understand the purpose of certain Web 2.0 applications.

Yahoo! Answers is a reasonably new social networking/online community/question answering service. The service allows any registered Yahoo user to ask just about any question and hopefully get an answer from another member of the question answering community. Yahoo! Answers, appears to be a definite extension of FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Expand) and Yahoo’s numerous efforts into online community building with services like Web 2.0 – think Yahoo 360 or Flickr. 

Yahoo! Answers is built to on the company’s social search technology with a focus on answering day to day questions of a subjunctive nature (Where can I buy…, What’s a good show to see…, etc.) and organizing them into a more structured info base with the use of several features including categories. Its motto is: Ask-Answer-Discover. Yahoo Answers uses a point and level system to reward participants and help identify the most active users.

I spent the last week or so messing around with Yahoo! Answers features, and here’s my verdict:

The concept is interesting however Yahoo! focussed on quantity rather then quality. It can be useful to answer questions such as who sings that really cool tune that’s on the radio all the time, or the name of a movie.

I was however shocked to see that someone asked how she could get revenge on her cheating husband! Surely this sort of question shouldn’t be allowed!  Another major drawback of Yahoo! Answers is the reliability and useless quantity of the answers given for each question – I’d much rather stick to Wikipedia! This may sound terribly harsh, but I think that Yahoo! Answers is a waste of space on the WWW…