Otavo - Putting the Quest in Questions
Otavo is a new collaborative information discovery and repository site that I’ve found myself addicted to recently. I heard about it on Pete’s review of the service on Mashable, and it sounded a lot like my favorite new community, FAQQLY, so I had to check it out. But Otavo turns out to be almost the opposite of FAQQLY. Where FAQQLY is a community site that encourages people to get to know people by asking questions and has the side effect of being able to gather knowledge and information, Otavo is about searching for information by turning questions into Quests and throwing in a bit of socialization on the side.
To participate, a Quest is created by a user that other users can subscribe to either to monitor the responses or to provide answers in the form of urls and/or comments. Otavo provides a browser bookmarklet tool called the Floster that makes adding links to quests when you’re surfing a relatively simple affair. Once you’ve joined a quest, you receive email notifications if anyone adds links to it. Otavo also provides points to members for actions such as creating quests, adding links to quests, posting on the forums and inviting others to join the service. Users can also create a network of buddies on the site and even keep a blog, but there is not too much of a social aspect beyond that at this point so isn’t a community as of yet. 
Otavo is a good excuse, however, for me to share some of the 3500+ urls that I’ve saved in Del.icio.us, Furl.net and a couple of other bookmarking services with people who are looking for that information. In fact, over five days of questing, I hit the #1 contributor spot mainly from adding links to other people’s Quests from my archives.
So while Otavo has a lot of potential, there are still some improvements that could be made, in my opinion, to make it even more useful, user-friendly and fun:
- Links on Quests should be rateable, so that it is easy to see what links were helpful to the Quest.
- Users should receive points if their links are highly rated.
- Users should be able to comment on links in the Quest in addition to commenting on the Quest as a whole.
- A way to easily import links from bookmarking services like Del.icio.us should be provided. I may have many relevant links that could be useful on a Quest but it is time consuming and cumbersome to go to Del.icio.us, open a link, open the Floster, copy my description and tags to the Floster and save, close the window and repeat for several more links. Maybe the Floster could recognize when you are on a Del.icio.us page and add a link next to your posts so that you could just click on the link to grab the information. Since the Floster is a DHTML/Javascript floating form on the page anyway, that wouldn’t be impossible.
- Points for creating a Quest should be removed or reduced. This only encourages people to create bogus quests.
- Points should be awarded to creators of popular Quests as they gain popularity. Popularity can be determined by number of people joining the Quest or number of links and comments provided or both. Possibly one point for each person, link or comment added.
- RSS feeds should be available for Quests themselves, users’ Quest lists, and possibly for the tags that links on Quests can be categorized under.
- Adding a link that you’ve already shared with another Quest should pick up the information (description and tags) that you shared before to save you the trouble of entering it again.
- Somehow, picking which quest to add a link to in the Floster needs to be made easier… Once you’ve participated in more than 10 Quests, the list gets too long to scroll through efficiently (the questions are too long to scan easily). Also, it seems sporadic as to whether the Floster “remembers” the last Quest I added a link to, and that has caused me to have to go move links around later that ended up on the wrong Quests.
- Quests with little participation should be “promoted” in some way to make them more likely to be picked up on. If they get buried under the popular Quests, then some of the “harder” Quests might be overlooked by the ones that are easy to answer and therefore popular. Possibly there could be a list of the least participated Quests to browse through.
Overall, I have found Otavo to be a pretty compelling service and if they will add some or all of the suggestions above, then it could really be outstanding and useful. Since its still new and only been in public beta for a short while, hopefully that means the Otavo team is still in the feedback and development stage and there is more to come. I’ll be watching as it evolves and trying to defend my status as King (Queen?) of the Quest hill!
