New post on Zavee Thinking by Ron Stack, COO, about the new social Q&A features on ask.com and the role of Q&A in social search and especially social shopping.
Remember Ask.com? Back before Google became almost synonymous with internet search (sorry, Yahoo!), Ask had users enter natural language questions rather than strings of keywords. Ask is about to relaunch with an interesting new structure. First, the search engine now returns natural language answers instead of links. Second, and even more interesting, users will be able to open their query to the user community for a crowd-sourced answer.