308 karma · joined August 5, 2011
I like that guy.
E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/
I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.
This is what I am doing with http://www.TwoToReal.com: Unlike SO/Quora/etc. it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate) and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one expert. Thus the currency of attention.
Currently, I am doing that (not with IRC, but with Jabber/XMPP) via my side-project http://TwoToReal.com (beta): You ask questions (or raise topics) for which automatically determined experts are then pulled in via IM into a real-time web chat (most of the knobs/switches are tuned by machine learning).
What are your pricing plans?