The month since the last development update has been a doozy.  First and foremost, qrisper.com has gone through yet another total redesign.  We’re at the 5th iteration now, for those that are counting.  Got a ton of feedback through the good folks at HackerNews, Collabfinder and the gang from FastTrac, not to mention my loyal alpha testers.

The overall gist of the feedback was that the colors sucked and that the previous landing page was confusing/not informative.  So I totally switched up the color scheme and added more content to the landing page.  Opening up the page layout allowed me to play with a different navigation flow to and from the homepage.  Here’s what the site looked like a few weeks ago.

One major difference now is the open availability of users’ answers across the site and more emphasis on user activity.  Will this draw more users to sign up?  Let’s hope so.

A couple of other things that have been keeping me busy:

• Finally figured out how to add the question text into the url using mod rewrite.  Downside to that was I lost all of the SEO juice I had already accumulated because I didn’t bother with a redirect.
• Created a star reward system for users – now users can get stars for being active qrispers, hooray!
• Added Facebook Comments but immediately removed them due to performance issues (debating whether or not I should create my own comments).
• Users can now change their answers.

Coming up next: photo galleries, personalized categories and Linode!

Am I the only one that sees the fundamental flaw with real-time search?  Basically, as soon as data is presented in real-time, it is no longer real-time data.  Real-time is not a tangible thing.  It’s an event.  Hence, you can push content in real-time (like a real time news feed).  However, you cannot pull real-time data (since, as soon as that information is indexed and disseminated, it’s no longer real-time).

This may just be semantics but I think all of this sudden interest in real-time data is misplaced.  I might be stating the obvious here but real-time data has nothing to do with time.  It’s about published static content vs. conversational dynamic content.  Whereas Google search is about information created by humans, real-time search is about human thought.

Umm…so what?  Well, conversations aren’t just happening in Twitter.  Think of all of the chats, forum discussions and blog comments that are permeating from every orifice of the internet.  If you could aggregate and somehow filter all of those thoughts into easily consumable thoughtlets, well that would be like having a search engine for the internet’s stream-of-consciousness.  We’ll call it…The Matrix.

A constructive discussion between the missus and I enlightened me to the fact that I had become a workaholic.  Which was surprising to me because I had never had a problem separating work and life before.  But as I commented on Tom’s piece about the insidious nature of entrepreneurship, I realized that I no longer had that mental work/life barrier to cross.

As soon as I left the office in my previous life, I ceased to care about the ordeals within the 9 to 5 (partly aided by my refusal to carry a Blackberry).  But now, from the minute I wake up till my second or third round of REM sleep, I just want to qrisper all the time, qrisper all the time, qrisper all the ti~ime~!

Problem was, amidst the stress and planning involved in creating my own business, and without the weight of other people’s money propping me up (yet), I was enjoying this life a little too much.  I mean, to create a product using only your brain and a few appendages, that’s some hot stuff right there!  If I wasn’t tempted by modern, materialistic goods, I’d be a carpenter right now.  But alas, I like shiny things.

Anyway, as soon as I became cognizant of the monster that I had become, all it took was a little self-control and a bit more planning to transform from qrisper mode into whisper mode, if you get what I mean, wink wink.

Yeah that was pretty gross.

Techcrunch reminds us that Ask is still around and they too are riding the question and answer bandwagon.  On a quick sidenote, why did they ever off Jeeves? I liked Jeeves…he was a solid brand.  People still refer to Ask as Ask Jeeves…but what do I know.

Anyway, back to the qnas.  What?  You didn’t know that there was a rush to become the first Yahoo Answers (because, really, Yahoo just can’t be the first of anything these days).  Well, in addition to Mahalo Answers, Aardvark and Answers.com, there’s Blurtit, Answerbag, Hunch, Sodahead and probably dozens more.  Like holy crap it’s a crowded arena!

With so many sites competing to solve the same problem, you’d think they could do a better job of answering questions.  Two overarching issues with most of these sites are

• Lack of question management (leading to the same questions being asked repeatedly)
• Focusing on the question-asking aspect as the social engine

This is why I like Hunch’s approach of utilizing machine learning to answer questions.  Too bad their user experience sucks.

As for the latter issue, qna sites would fare better by following Yelp’s model and creating a community of answerers.  Because no one cares about your question.  But I’ll gladly tell you what I think about your question.

A better experience can be had with question and answer sites.  Answers are the key.

Hunch.com is a decision-tree generator that tries to help you make better decisions.  The concept is actually very similar to what qrisper is attempting to do.  However, their approach is too analytical…too cranial.

The problem is that not everyone thinks so methodically when making decisions.  Hunch would make sense for when making life-changing decisions like relocating to a foreign country or buying a house in an unfamiliar location.  Here Hunch has the potential of asking questions that you might not necessarily come up with in your own research.

However, the fundamental issue is that Hunch ignores the emotional aspect of decision making.  Hunch makes the assumption that people think things through rationally before making decsions.  We humans are not rational beings.  Sometimes it’s just a gut feeling.  Sometimes it’s just the time of day.

After taking Hunch for spin, “Wow, I know answering all of these questions will eventually lead me to a much more rewarding answer!” was not what I was thinking.  It was more like, “Why am I wasting my time populating Hunch’s databases by answering these useless questions?  Is this really helping me make a decision?”

Yes.  Hunch.  Fail.