Answers, Badges, and Big Brains
- Posted June 15th, 2006 at 9:43 am by Yahoo! Search
- Categories: Answers
I have to be honest. When Yahoo! Answers first came out, I really didn’t know what to expect. Did the world need yet another place to ask questions online?
After writing Asking the Internet, I watched to see which way it would go. Now here we are six months later and Yahoo! Answers has far more of a following than I ever expected. Some of them gather in the Answerholics Anonymous group while others obsessively watch the leaderboard, hoping to climb the ranks.
This week we’ve been pouring more fuel on the fire…
Flash Badges
For a while now, we’ve offered simple cut-and-paste JavaScript badges that you can put on your own web site to, you know, show off what you know (or whish you knew). You never know when someone looking at one of your pages might know the answer to a nagging question.
We’ve heard from a lot of people that wanted to add a badge to their sites but didn’t have the skills or access required to use them. And many sites simply don’t allow third-party JavaScript. So to make life easier, we now offer Flash badges that work nearly anywhere, including TypePad, Blogger, and others. (MySpace and Yahoo! 360 support coming in a few days.) To get one of your own, start with the badge selector.
Nick recently announced the flash badge on the Yahoo! Answers blog, so you can read more of the story there.
Big Brains in New York
To celebrate the full launch of Yahoo! Answers (it’s not beta anymore!), we’ve had a big promotion going on in New York City this week. As part of “Ask The Planet 2006″, we constructed–I kid you not–a big brain in Times Square and packed it die-hard Yahoo! Answers users.
Since not all the smart people are in New York, we also have Flickr Photos and a live video feed.
Read more about it from Search Engine Watch and TechCrunch.
It wouldn’t be a big bash without prizes and celebrities, right? Luckily, we’ve got both. Check the calendar of events to see who is involved when. You just might get to answer a question from Click and Clack (the Car Talk guys), Al Gore, or Stephen Hawking.
Jeremy Zawodny
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The new Answers badge is pretty cool looking. We should have the option of choosing whether our answers or questions show up rather then just our questions. Ask the Planet rocks!
Nice logo and picture. It is great that Yahoo! Answers is not beta anymore and that finally we have it in Spanish too. I think it is pretty handy.
In response to Stephen Hawkings question: Humans can survive if they greatly curtail religions and what they can teach, promote humanity rather than nationalism, collaborate on finding cures to dieases, educate everyone, and collectively work to depose leaders who espouse violence or inhumanity upon the people of their nation or any other nation.