LazyTweet
LazyTweet is a merger of The LazyWeb (more here) and Twitter. The idea of The LazyWeb started out as solicitations for features and product ideas, but with the help of the conversations started with blogs and twitter, it morphed into requests or questions of any sort.
Additionally, the idea with LazyTweet is to embrace and extend the questions being asked on Twitter, progressively enhancing Twitter discussions, with the lowest friction possible, while opening those questions up to a wider audience. Joshua Porter refers to apps like these as barnacle apps. Think of this as Yahoo! Answers for Twitter.
Filed under Q&A |ToAnswer
ToAnswer is a Twitter mashup that will help you get your questions answered quickly - think Yahoo! Answers meets Twitter. The basic premise of ToAnswer is this: some users ask questions, the questions are indexed, and other users respond to questions that may know the answer to.
Getting Started
- 1) Sign up for a Twitter account
- 2) Follow ToAsk & ToAnswer
- 3) Ask your own questions
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Post a Twitter update with the following format:
@ToAsk Are there any good pizza joints in downtown Los Angeles?
The ToAnswer birdie scours Twitter looking for new questions, and it will find your question, index it, and post it on the ToAnswer homepage in just a few minutes.
- 4) Answer others’ questions
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On the ToAnswer homepage there is a listing of the questions that users have asked. If you see any questions that you are able to answer, then choose the “Answer this question†link under the question. The link will bring you to Twitter, with the update box populated with the necessary prefix. For posterity, the answer format should look like this:
@ToAnswer [question id] No, there’s no such thing as good pizza outside of NYC.
It is important that you do not delete the seemingly arbitrary ID number. It associates your answer with the proper question.
HelpWithTwitter Answers
For Mosio users there comes a service called Twitter Answers. To use the service, Mosio users must first befriend the Mosio Twitter bot, and then they can ask it any questions using Twitter’s direct messaging feature. Other users who have also befriended the bot will get the question (syndicated from the bot), and up to four of them can directly reply to you. Without any sort of threading, it’s difficult to see the answers in Twitter itself, by on Mosio, you can see the entire exchange in order.
