There have been a few projects here on news.yc that follow the same pattern (in my opinion). And please take it as a constructive and healthy criticism.
I cannot really coin a proper name for this pattern, but I may call it "how is it better than Google?" problem. Thing is: there are already thousands of outlets where people ask questions on a regular basis: google groups, IRC, emails, thousands of PhpBB boards and a small army of advertisement-heavy outlets like expertexchange.com and "Yahoo Answers".
And google can search most of them really well.
Now, what is it that differentiates your offering from that plethora of options?
These are two questions everyone building "user-generated content site" should be asking:
1. What is the benefit for people asking vs google search?
2. What is the benefit for people answering, i.e. submitting content?
If you look around, you'll notice that every successful "user-generated content site" has fairly obvious answers to these two questions.
For instance: YC drives visitors to ask/answer because of it's obvious vertical focus on software startups. Additionally it uses a popular karma-points system with extra twist of minor but amusing features available only to active contributors.
Thanks for your feedback. To answer your questions,
1. Benefit for the person asking the question: The person gets answer from the people he knows. When I needed CPA to file my taxes this year I found myself sending email to my office colleagues although there are many CPA reviews available on web. May be it's just me but sometimes suggestions from the people you know matter more than generic review site.
2. Benefit for the people who answer: These are people who are friends with the person asking the question. If they see email in their Inbox from a friend asking a specific question I think at least few of them will help.
I cannot really coin a proper name for this pattern, but I may call it "how is it better than Google?" problem. Thing is: there are already thousands of outlets where people ask questions on a regular basis: google groups, IRC, emails, thousands of PhpBB boards and a small army of advertisement-heavy outlets like expertexchange.com and "Yahoo Answers".
And google can search most of them really well.
Now, what is it that differentiates your offering from that plethora of options?
These are two questions everyone building "user-generated content site" should be asking:
1. What is the benefit for people asking vs google search?
2. What is the benefit for people answering, i.e. submitting content?
If you look around, you'll notice that every successful "user-generated content site" has fairly obvious answers to these two questions.
For instance: YC drives visitors to ask/answer because of it's obvious vertical focus on software startups. Additionally it uses a popular karma-points system with extra twist of minor but amusing features available only to active contributors.
My $0.02