Questions — Ask And Answer is an iOS app, pictured left, that’s using video to animate and humanise the Q&A format.
Spicing up the tried-and-tested Q&A format to make it fit for a
visually obsessed age is energising plenty of startups at present. The
very recent (and high profile) category entrant, Biz Stone’s new startup
Jelly,
for instance, is not just a Q&A startup; it’s a Q&A startup
that let’s people frame their questions within its slick, photo-centric
interface — which is one way to make the well-worn questions &
answers format feel shiny and new, rather than, you know, like
Yahoo Answers.
Jelly’s
Tinder-style
swipe interface helps too. As does its piggybacking on existing social
networks to provide a little structure to who is providing the answers
to your questions. And of course it’s mobile first. Point is, Jelly is
more about execution and interface than freshness of the underlying
idea. But that’s fine. Curiosity satisfied (aka Q&A) remains an
addictive, motivating force. The day people run out of stuff to ask each
other is the day Q&A startups should give up and go home.
Ask.fm is another Q&A startup that springs to mind as building momentum behind the format (although it’s since run into problems with teenage bullying).
While search engines like Google are also a form of Q&A, albeit
largely algorithmically retrieving answers to human questions. The
dominance of algorithmic approaches by tech giants like Google has of
course left room (and appetite) for startups to take a more human
approach to Q&A. So enter Jelly, or hello
Quora. And so on.
Returning to the Questions app, it’s tackling Q&A by reframing
the format as a video conversation between askers and answerers.
Founder,
Oladayo Olagunju has previous pedigree in the video space. Back in 2011 he launched a startup called
Nyoombl – which TC’s MG Siegler described as “a sort of hybrid of Skype and YouTube”.
Nyoombl as a social broadcasting platform hasn’t eclipsed YouTube but
is still around — and has hosted chats between a plethora of
individuals, including UK Prime Minister David Cameron and Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg, in
one example. (The startup was seed-backed (mainly) by
Chris Kelly, former Chief Privacy of Facebook, with a roster of advisors that included entrepreneur
Adam Rifkin, Sun Microsystems co-founder
Scott McNealy, and venture capitalist
Lara Druyan.)
Presumably Nyoombl provided Olagunju’s inspiration for the follow up
Questions app — although there are clear differences. Nyoombl hosts live
broadcasts of up to seven minute-long conversations on its web
platform, as well as playback after the fact. Whereas Questions is more
ephemeral in its content — it’s about what you could call
micro-conversations, with users recording 10 second video questions and
other users replying to them with 10 second video answers.
Ten seconds is pretty throwaway, in terms of content — your
question/explanation can only go so deep — but it’s enough time for
personality to shine. Questions’ user generated content is therefore
ephemeral
in duration but can have more of an impact than its length might suggest, because of the personalities on display.
It should also be noted that Questions’ content is not literally
ephemeral; the videos remain on the platform as there’s apparently no
way for users to delete a question or answer once uploaded. And that is
slightly concerning, being as the app is clearly aimed at appealing to
teens (it didn’t take much browsing of the app to find one
youthful-looking Questions user effectively confessing to having smoked
weed on video — a video that’s going to stay up there for anyone to play
and replay for as long as the app is in existence).
Being as users take videos of themselves asking and answering they
are also typically identifiable. Which again isn’t great if you’re the
kid publicly confessing to drug use, but the confessional video selfie
medium may act as a general check and balance on user behaviour. That is
important for a startup targeting the teen demographic — considering
the difficulties with abusive content and teen suicide that Ask.fm has
run into (for instance).
Using video as the medium for its Q&A format also means Questions
becomes a repository of animated selfies — affording brief glimpses
into the lives and personalities of an assortment of strangers. In an
age obsessed with selfies the app’s living ‘human library’ of content,
displaying a grip of faces tagged with their queries to click on, feels
as if it has the power to resonate and captivate.
Certainly, it succeeds in humanising the Q&A format —
although Olagunju actually says he does not view Questions as a Q&A
app. For him, the mission of this micro-video medium is far grander than
helping people find the right factoid with which to plug a particular
knowledge gap. Its focus is on human curiosity and conversations.
Qualifying that further, it’s about “everyday conversations” — meaning
the resulting knowledge is necessarily colloquial. (But that of course
can still be informative, or entertaining, or interesting, and so on.)
“Questions is not a Q&A app. Wonderfully, verbal stimuli (Q) and
facial or verbal reactions (A) to those stimuli do form the basis of
conversations,” he tells TechCrunch.
(To my mind, the app shares something with BBC Radio 4′s
The Listening Project –
a project to record and broadcast short conversations between two
interlocutors that they choose to let the radio audience listen in on.)
Olagunju has a history of taking a stealthy approach in his startup
launches — this was true of Nyoombl, and has also been true in the case
of Questions, which quietly went live on the App Store back in
November. There’s also a serious streak to his startups — Nyoombl was
about “democratising conversations”, i.e. by allowing others to listen
in and learn. And although Olagunju doesn’t use the empathy word (as Biz Stone did, with Jelly), he does talk about having a vision for “what society should be”.
So Questions feels like it has an ultimate goal of improving humanity
by helping people better understand themselves and each other. In other
words: more empathy, less prejudice. Which is indeed a noble goal.
“We don’t gravitate towards trends or what may be comfortable. We
have a vision of how the world and society should be, and we move with
solemn conviction to bring it that vision to fruition,” Olagunju adds.
So what sorts of questions are the current users of Questions asking?
That depends on the user, of course, but there’s plenty of classic
kids’ obsessions on display — favourite colour, food, how many siblings
you have, how old you think they are, and so on.
The app does also include categories so you can browse Q&As in
channels — such as sports & entertainment, religion, science &
technology — if you want to view and target specific knowledge areas or
opinions. It also sorts content based on popularity, or by the newest
posts, and there’s a search function to seek out particular types of
questions or to find other users.
Generally speaking, the sorts of questions you’ll find in the app are
the sorts of queries that characterise humanity via its obsessions,
large and small: so grand themes of sex, death and religion, rub
shoulders with more quotidian concerns and curiosities, and/or the
desire to fit in or be liked by peers.
It’s the sort of stuff people are always curious about — regardless
of gender, race, religion. And the answers provided by other app users,
though usually necessarily partial and/or subjective, are curiously
reassuring because they show how similar people are, despite the visual
differences on clear display through the video medium.
So, really, if you want to find an app that’s actually doing
something to make the world a more empathetic place, not just sprinkling
grand claims over a marketing-friendly interface like so many Silicon
Valley Utopianism sprinkles, then Questions is a great place to start
your search for answers.
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