mahalo

• Today launches the latest addition to Jason Calacanis’s human edited search and discovery destination, Mahalo. I had the chance to stop by the office on Friday and check out what was happening. Project A as it has been secretly known for the last couple months, turns out to be Jason’s twist on Yahoo Answers; Mahalo Answers. Since it’s inception, Mahalo has gone through many iterations, trying to integrate and improve upon popular concepts from the most powerful destinations on the web. 
• Mahalo Answers is a community-driven knowledge market (or Question and Answer) engine, first implemented by the #1 search company in Korea, Naver in 2002. The Korean engine has had wild success with the product and is the top way people search for things on the web in the country. The concept was finally brought to the US by Yahoo! on December 13,2005 with the launch of Yahoo Answers. 
• How does Mahalo play into this? Calacanis thinks that he can beat Yahoo Answers at their own game, since the search giant has paid little attention and offered few incentives/new features to the more than 60 million members that occupy the site. 
• One specific problem he addresses, the point systems. Users are given points on Yahoo Answers when they answer questions, get selected as the best response, log-in to the site, etc. The points and levels have no real world value, cannot be traded, and serve only to indicate how active a user has been on the site. A notable downside to the points/level side is that it encourages people to answer questions even when they do not have a suitable answer to give, in order to gain points. Mahalo Answers will let people that are asking questions offer a monetary incentive to people who answer their question the best. In addition, people offering illegitimate responses will have their content removed from the response system by the Mahalo team (who will also be helping generate responses). Yahoo has constant spam responses. 
• The real question is, would someone want to pay to have a question answered? Well, in the week that Mahalo Answers has been in closed beta, it certainly proves that some are. Calacanis‘ strategy to ensure that people will want to fork out some money has been to get experts from all industries to answer questions about certain topics. Imagine for a few dollars you can ask a legal expert how to deal with a specific issue rather than browse through pages and pages of content through Google. Or, for another few dollars, asking Mark Cuban how to go about buying a baseball team? (Mark is actually going to be answering questions along with other web personalities and celebs). The ‘Expert’ strategy is very smart and will certainly keep people pouring money back into the system. Some of the beta testers have already made over $100 answering questions. Calacanis thinks it’s perfect timing to offer something like this, saying “many people are out of work, and this is an easy way to make some extra money”. In the end, Mahalo takes a 25% cut of the asking price. 
• Another feature Yahoo Answers doesn’t have is the ability to syndicate your questions directly into micro-blog services like Twitter. This will surely make the question and answer based system a lot easier to get quality answers from crowds that you trust. 
• All in all, the product is very impressive. The goal is to double traffic for Mahalo to 10 million uniques a month within the year, which should happen even if the concept gains the slightest bit of traction from it’s giant competitor. They think the double in traffic will get them on someone’s radar for an acquisition sometime in the next couple years. Nice job guys. 

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