This morning I got an email from Amazon, inviting me to their new start-up venture: Askville. Normally I don't bother with a lot of startup social networking websites, because there's always a new one with a new angle just around the corner. What makes Askville different (and worthy of blogging about here) is that they're using a game paradigm with this venture.
On Askville, users post questions and answers and are given quest coins. When you accumulate enough coins, you can then purchase superpowers. These superpowers then allow you to accumulate more coins and with more coins comes more privileges (these privileges are more like voting rights than anything else).
Rather than a message board mentality where the questions are arranged by topic, they're just all lumped together, using tag clouds for organization. Users who answer questions are encouraged to use Askville's tools for adding more links to products on Amazon. I'd probably use their little product linker more if it allowed me to use my own Amazon Associates ID, but as it stands, the product linker doesn't have that option, and labels the product for Askville's Amazon Associate's ID number.
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