Wis.dm Takes a Simple Look at Q&A

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Toward the end of last year we covered a veritable cornucopia of question and answer sites. They mostly served as aggregation sites for members to post, answer, and rate questions. Yahoo effectively dominated the space, leveraging their user base and even adding an API. Q&A service Wis.dm has taken a different look at questions and answers, and added a Facebook application today.

Wis.dm is for simple yes/no questions, not about writing long answers to life’s most elusive questions. Within the Facebook application you can answer a stream of questions that appear on Wis.dm. Unfortunately you can’t ask questions through the application right now. As you answer questions, Wis.dm assigns you points and matches you with other users that answer questions similarly to you.

The long-term vision is to match up potential friends and help silo Wis.dm users into interest groups. Matching people based on their answer history is also gives them a clear way to insert contextual advertising into the question stream. Advertisers on Wis.dm will be able to target their ads based on a user’s question profile (i.e people who answer positively to sports questions, get the latest ESPN ad).