Beepl Aims To Answer All Your Questions Via Social Media Accounts
Beepl, a Q&A platform that links into social media accounts, launched publicly today. Established in 2011, Beepl aims to get questions answered by matching topics to users; the Beepl users themselves provide the answers to another user’s question, with Beepl stating, “It’s our mission to surface the expertise that each of us has; expertise that often goes unnoticed.” Beepl aims to match users to topics by harnessing their social media interests by connecting the service to existing Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. In addition, users are ranked on their overall contribution to Beepl, which means one can garner a reputation as being an active expert in their field on the site.
Although the site aims to be a centre of expertise, it’s unclear how this will progress as a quick browse of popular questions yields results such as “What’s a calorie?”. There’s also a number of other speculative or opinion based questions where there’s no definitive answers to, such as “What is a good red wine to drink with steak?”, with some users posting questions that would be suited to a fortune-teller, philosopher or relationship expert. So opinion and recommendation seems to be the direction that Beepl has taken thus far, as dictated by those using the platform, but as it is a platform that seeks to match topics to users, you may not see any of these kinds of questions, depending on how you use it and what your interests are.
Beepl could be useful in looking for answers to practical questions such as technology based questions, but only if the right people use the service and are prepared to dispatch their advice for free, with the reward being an enhanced reputation in the Beepl community. So can the answers provided to a question be seen as a kind of personalised search engine result, the engine here being social media users? Or do sites like these this set a precedent that people will no longer be prepared to pay for the advice of an expert? And for that reason, are experts likely to sign up and impart their advice for free?
