Question about "nownow" feature

[rocky1938]

I see that Kindle offers a feature similar to Yahoo Answers and askville where you can punch in a question and a bunch of people will research it and send you responses. Does the Kindle allow you to either vote on the answers you've received or send the person who answered feedback (ie "your answer sucked", or "nice!")?

[NatCh]

Welcome to MobileRead, rocky1938! I expect we're going to have to wait until someone actually has one of these things to try it out on, to learn the answer to your question.

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Welcome to MobileRead, rocky1938! I expect we're going to have to wait until someone actually has one of these things to try it out on, to learn the answer to your question.

It seems a couple people do now have them. Overnight shipping.

[NowNowTrog]

Originally Posted by rocky1938

I see that Kindle offers a feature similar to Yahoo Answers and askville where you can punch in a question and a bunch of people will research it and send you responses. Does the Kindle allow you to either vote on the answers you've received or send the person who answered feedback (ie "your answer sucked", or "nice!")?

Hi, I'm one of the people who regularly answers questions through the NowNow service. The people who answer your questions depend on you sending them a Great vote for their answer in order to get paid. The NowNow service runs through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and the workers (laughingly called a "staff" in Amazon's promotional materials) earn three cents per question, which is essentially nothing, but for every Great vote they get from an asker, they earn a chance to win a bonus in a weekly contest of as much as $100. Good votes don't count for anything, Lame and Junk votes just mean they won't even earn their three cents. Without getting Great votes, no one would be answering these questions and every time someone answers one without getting a Great vote, they've completely wasted their time.

Unfortunately, I don't think most Kindle users know about the voting. NowNow has been running for over a year, and most NowNow users don't seem to know about the voting either since most answers don't get votes. I don't know exactly how you go about submitting a vote through the Kindle. The NowNow FAQ lists the way you would vote from a mobile device, but I don't know if that's how the Kindle works or if maybe there's a link to vote on the answer in the emails people receive or something. There's no other way to send a worker feedback that I know of, but of course you can complain to the NowNow service if need be.

NowNow/Amazon never bothered to tell their workers that they'd be answering questions from Kindle users. Last year when they started up Askville they sent questions to NowNow workers, too, and never told them where the questions were originating. Back then we started getting a bunch of Amazon customer service questions ("How come my order hasn't arrived?") that we couldn't answer. And now we're starting to get a lot of Kindle questions ("Can I disable the Next Page button on the right hand side?") that we can't answer. We don't know anything about the Kindle other than what's on the web. It's very frustrating.

Anyway, I hope this answers your question and I'm sorry that it comes off as a whine. But I think many of the regular workers are annoyed by this development and I thought someone from the outside world might like to know about it.

[Nate the great]

I just now found this. Interesting.

[rationalbiker]

Ironically, I think my first question to NowNow would be; Is it financially worthwhile to answer questions for NowNow?