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

It’s hard for us on the core product team to believe that it’s only been 2 months since we launched the beta of Yahoo! Answers. Since then, we’ve added many features to the site in a steady stream of improvements. So it seems like a good time to catch you up!

To refresh, Answers is a question and answer exchange that enables people to tap into the collective wisdom of a world of web users.

Here’s a few of the new features you’ll find:

Yeah, What You Said
Sometimes, a question you ask has already been answered. And sometimes, you might stumble upon a better way to ask a question. So we developed an Ajax widget that searches previously asked questions as you’re typing in your question. Look below to see how it works.

Users Helping Users
Before long, people started using Answers to ask questions about Answers. So we started a Yahoo! Products section, where users respond to fellow users’ questions about Answers. This worked so well, we’ve expanded the product section to include Yahoo! Mail, 360, and Messenger. Users also tell us what’s on their minds in the Forum, or leave a comment on our Blog. We’re also highlighting users in a new weekly Featured User section, as well as highlighting the top 5,000 point getters on the Leaderboard.

Showing What You Know
For those bloggers and website owners, we built a Badge that can be customized and displayed on any website or blog. Grab your own toolbar button while you’re there.

Oh, and now you can get an RSS feed of Q&A by search keywords, in addition to your own Q&A, other user’s Q&A, and Q&A by category.

There are many more features coming soon, so come visit us at Yahoo! Answers. We look forward to hearing from you!

Yumio Saneyoshi and the Yahoo! Answers team