I have been terribly lax in updating my blog lately. Besides other things getting in the way, at least for the last few weeks, I’ve been distracted by a new service I found that is extremely addicting. That service is FAQQLY: an idea started by Dave Liu, a student at UCLA, and designed to be a whole different take on what makes an online community.

FAQQLY is about questions. Lots of questions. Membership is free and you are provided with your own FAQ page. There you list “Ask me abouts”, or topics you’d like to discuss and wait for people to drop by and ask you about them (or anything else they’d like). If no one leaves you a question, its not a problem! You can always draw from the “Bucket of Questions” where FAQQLY users post random queries on whatever comes to mind. The bucket, one of my favorite and FAQQLY’s most addictive features, contains everything from classic “verses” questions (Pirate or Ninja?) to the far more deep and philisophical.

Some of the best features from several popular community services are combined in FAQQLY. It has the topic agnosticism and the social fun aspects of MySpace.com, but where MySpace is more of a wild and crazy frat party, FAQQLY is more like a dinner party with your friends with polite and stimulating conversation. It is also similar to Yahoo! Answers in that you can ask about anything you want, but you seek out people to query who have already expressed some kind of knowledge in the area you’re curious about (through their topics list) and so generally will get a more relevant answer, or at least an interesting discussion. Because of the structure imposed by the FAQ the ugliness of MySpace’s user customized layouts is avoided, and because there’s a bit more personal accountability for questions (since FAQs are focused around people) it avoids the random stupidity and sometimes incomprehensibility of questions and answers that pervade Yahoo! Answers. These aspects seem to encourage a slightly more mature (mentally if not by age) membership, which is one more reason FAQQLY is attractive to me.

Friends lists are maintained as in most social networks. Once you are friends with someone there are several other features that are available between you. You may ask for Help, which is basically like posting a question to everyone on your friends list, and you may also create “Shares”, which are postings about items that you are willing to give, trade or lend to your friends. The Shares (and to some extent the Helps), are designed to encourage you to meet your friends in meatspace. While this is a something that I can see as being popular among the younger crowd such as those still in high school or college, I doubt that it will work as well for the older folks. One thing I actually like is being able to get to know people from other countries or even different states, whom I will probably never have the chance to meet in real life.

Built with Ruby on Rails, FAQQLY is agile development in action. Just in the few weeks since I’ve been a member there have been at least 3 site updates and several new features added (including the Bucket). Dave and the FAQQLY team are very open to suggestions and feedback and they are continually making updates and improvements to the site. As it evolves, I believe FAQQLY has the potential to be a really useful community as well as an entertaining one. I’ve chatted with some of the team about implementing groups, which would end up being similar to a topic forum. People could ask for help from many potentially knowledgeble people once they are in place, but still have the questions show up in their personal FAQ as part of the sum of their knowledge.

FAQQLY is a good alternative for people who might want to blog but can’t decide what to blog about. I always hoped that my blog would be a place where I could get conversations started on topics that I was interested in. But the only way to have conversations is to have enough people around who might want to talk with you. Either you have to bring the people to you (generate large amounts of traffic) or go where people are (join a community). If you are interested in lot of unrelated topics and post about all of them, its hard to draw a regular audience for your blog, and if you join an online community, its usually goal or topic focused so your other interests aren’t appropriate for discussion. FAQQLY solves that problem by giving you an audience that’s ready to talk about almost anything. Your FAQ could also be seen as an aggregator for your participation in groups. FAQQLY is a one-stop shop. I find that more satisfying than just participating in many different forums on many different sites with many different logins and passwords to remember. Potentially I would only have to come to one site to find information on many topics as well as be able to help others by sharing my experiences and lessons learned as well.

Of course, everything is dependant on how big and diverse the community at FAQQLY is. Right now, its largely homogenous; having spread through word of mouth from Dave to his friends to their friends, but it is growing every day and starting to differentiate. Currently very few of my interests have matches when I search on them, but I have managed to find a few kindred spirits.

FAQQLY is a brilliant idea and if it continues to improve at the rate it has been then I expect great things. At the least it’s been very entertaining, at it’s best it could be my favorite social and information discovery site. So sign up and come ask me a question!