So credit Swedish startup Mancx for trying something different.

The Stockholm-based company — which is today announcing a $1.65 million round of financing from Swedish backers Almi Invest and Chalmers Innovation Seed Fund — has spent the past year developing a twist on the traditional Q&A formula: it’s a service where people can get paid for giving answers.

The idea is that there are some questions that people would happily pay money to get the right answer to, rather than wade through huge swathes of opinion or commentary, like many free Q&A rivals.

“We’re targeting the premium segment of information that people won’t give away for free,” says co-founder Henrik Dillman. He suggests that the potential is substantial. “Stack Exchange is one of the best Q&A sites out there, but even it has over 600,000 unanswered questions. If five or 10 percent of those people were willing to pay for the answer, that’s big.”

The site works much like any auction site or marketplace: people post questions and suggest the price they’d be willing to pay to get a good answer. Those who think they can provide a solution place their own bids in the auction, and the asker gets to pick the winner (people can also offer answers for free if they want). There’s a money-back guarantee in case the answer is no good, and a reputational system in place to try and prevent people from gaming the service.

“It’s a big challenge,” admits the site’s other co-founder, Mattias Guilotte, of the need to make the reputation system work. “Once you have information, you have it — you can’t take it out of somebody’s brain.”

I’ll admit I am skeptical of the concept working long-term, purely because the internet drives down the value of information — something we have seen time and time again. But the duo insist that they are making headway, and they’ve got some pretty strong data behind them. Riding on the back of LinkedIn, the site has access to more than 600,000 users, and currently has 10,000 ongoing questions on site.

But here’s the real killer: people are paying serious money already. Right now the average transaction, they say, is worth around $150, and it’s going up over time.

That’s partly because there’s a community — mainly centered around marketing and sales — that places a high value on the answers they get. And the team plans to extend that opportunity by pushing hard in new communities and new countries, using the new funding to first open an office in San Francisco, and then targeting India and China. Put it all together, they say, and the opportunity here could be significant.

“Around 300 million people turn to Q&A online each month, but low quality answers are a big problem,” says Dillman. “It’s a big shift from three or four years ago, when people expected everything should be free.”

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Now Thumb is evolving with its biggest update to date, allowing its users to become more expressive and social and making Thumb more of a full-fledged social netwok for opinions.  Here’s a look at some of the improvements in Thumb 3.0:

• Users don’t have to just pose a question, but they can now express a sentiment and get feedback on it. This can be great for big events or just to allow people to get different conversations started.
• Users can build out their profiles by saving opinions to their profile. They can curate their own opinions or save other people’s items to their profile and they can give a thumbs up or down to each item.
• The service now has a full-blown messaging system, that allows direct messaging back and forth between users. There were some ways for people to converse before but they were built around actual questions.
• There’s now a leaderboard that lets people compete to see who can earn the most stars.

Thumb, which has raised $5.3 million to date, isn’t sharing user numbers though CEO and founder Dan Kurani said users are spending three hours and 50 minutes a month on average on the service. The average post can get anywhere from 50 to 100 responses back, with the feedback rolling in within seconds.

That kind of feedback can be exciting and addictive. And it shows how Q&A on mobile can be really engaging and can increasingly be used as a way for people to express themselves like Pinterest. It also demonstrates that interest-based social networks, especially one built for mobile, can compete in a Facebook world by giving people ways to connect and express themselves around specific topics.

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Even with all that traction, Formspring has taken its time when it comes to making money. The company has tasked its 30-person staff with developing new features and lining up celebrity users rather than on populating the site with advertisements. But now the company’s revenue strategy is starting to take shape with a new initiative called “Formspring Interests.”

All about Interests

Starting Tuesday, Formspring will start letting users add up to six interests to their profiles such as music, fashion and beauty, gaming, sports, and celebrity gossip. In addition, Formspring has inked partnerships with eight major media firms — MTV, Hearst, AOL Huffington Post, and Funny or Die, to name a few — that will be able to create relevant questions for users who have expressed interest in a related topic.

No money is associated with the media partnerships yet, Formspring’s COO Ro Choy said in a recent interview. But the interest information will allow Formspring to eventually show users more specifically targeted ads once the company starts running advertisements. According to Choy, it’s been a deliberately slow road to monetization because of the hyper-competitive Internet landscape:

“We have a really clear shot at becoming a major player as a social media network, and to get there you have to be amazing, because you’re competing with some of the very best companies on the web. You can’t mishandle the user experience — we’ve been making sure the user is having fun, enjoying the experience, and having an authentic communication with friends.”

A big step toward real revenue

Formspring Interests, however, is the company’s first major step toward real revenue generation. Choy said:

“At the end of the day we are a business, and the future of the company and monetization is very much related to the Interests launch. In the future, brand advertisers will have more opportunities to make relevant ads. It could be a sponsored question situation, or it could be an ad on the side of the page.”

The Interests launch is also indicative of Formspring attracting a broader and more mature audience. The site’s main user base is young people between the ages of 13 and 24, and Interests is aimed at the higher end of that spectrum. The way Choy explained it, teenagers’ lives are centered around their friends, and Formspring addresses that by letting those users talk directly to each other. But when people are 17 and older, they start to identify more with outside interests. Addressing that demographic more strongly is a logical next step for Formspring, and it will be interesting to watch how users and companies take to the site’s evolution.

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Mostly, the deal seems to be an acq-hire: The friend.ly app will continue to work as it always has, but going forward, friend.ly’s 10-person team will be working on new products at Facebook, friend.ly said in a blog post announcing the deal.

Friend.ly's team (click to enlarge)

Friend.ly was founded in 2010 and has reportedly raised $5 million in venture capital from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital and angel investors including Ron Conway and Jeff Clavier. Typical friend.ly questions are reminiscent of those asked on formspring.me, but they tend to be a bit tamer: “What would you take with you on a desert island?” and “Are long-distance relationships possible?”

Here’s Facebook’s statement on the deal:

We’re excited to announce that we recently acquired friend.ly, a Silicon Valley startup that created a really compelling way for people to express themselves and meet others through answering questions. We’ve admired the team’s efforts for some time now, and we’re looking forward to having Ed [Baker, friend.ly's CEO] and his colleagues make a big impact on the way millions of people connect and engage with each other on Facebook.

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Joshua Schachter

Joshua Schachter, best known for creating social bookmarking site Delicious, started Tasty Labs in November 2010 with a vague mission statement: “We’re putting the useful back in social software.” On Friday, Tasty Labs announced its first product to the public: Jig.com.

Jig is meant to be “a marketplace for things people need,” wrote Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson (a Tasty Labs investor) in a blog post Friday morning. In an earlier post on Jig’s own blog, Co-Founder Nick Nguyen wrote:

“Our Jig is a website, one that helps you with your needs — by making it easy to share them with people who can help solve them. We built Jig to make it easy to describe what you need with just a few words.”

Essentially, Jig allows people to post questions about anything they need — there are no categories yet, just one big stream — and allow anyone out there to answer them. At the top of the page is a prompt that starts with “I need” followed by a text box that allows you to write a descriptive title, your location, and a few details. Jig has one section for answered questions (more than one person can answer, and each reply can be voted up by clicking “I agree” or “Thank”) and a second section for unanswered questions.

As I’m writing this, some of the questions on the answered page are titled “I need a new show to watch,” “I need a place to buy silk suspenders in Berkeley,” and “I need to find a new loving home for my MacBook air.”

Craigslist strikes me as the initial comparison here, but Jig is different because it has better messaging features and provides each user with a profile. But it’s not exactly clear what edge Jig has on the offerings from companies either the Q&A space, such as Ask.com, Answers.com and Quora, or the peer-to-peer task management space such as TaskRabbit and Zaarly. According to SEC filings, Tasty Labs has raised $3 million in venture capital to date, so the company may still be cooking things up to further develop the Jig idea.

Image of Joshua Schachter courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito

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Ask has inked new partnerships with Lonely Planet, Sports Network, Weather Underground, Lyrics.com and others to power its new “Smart Answers” initiative. In an interview Wednesday, Ask’s director of partnerships Dave Amato told me the Smart Answers feature is aimed at providing a highly relevant and useful answer from a source with “high integrity.” Ask has 25 Smart Answer partners up and live right now, and plans to add at least three or four new partners every few months going forward.

The company has found that these types of answers are exactly what their users want — a blend of personality and accuracy. “We’re the only Q&A service that combines search with answers from real people,” Amato said. “We know for a fact that users love Smart Answers because they tell us.” Another big focus for Smart Answers is its usefulness for Ask’s mobile site. “When you’re on mobile, that is definitely when you don’t want to wade through blue links.”

Ask has been especially choosy about the partners it has picked for the Smart Answers initiative. “We get approached all the time from content providers and brands who want to be an answer provider, and when we find out what they really want is an ad, we turn down those immediately,” Amato said.

In all, Ask seems to be firing at all cylinders to fend off competition from hot new Q&A sites such as Quora. Adding new big-name friends to answer users’ commonly asked questions — such as how many calories are in a bagel — this seems like a smart move indeed.

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Formspring CEO Ade Olonoh

Formspring.me has hit a major milestone in its relatively short lifespan. The 18-month-old San Francisco-based startup, which allows users to create profile pages on which anonymous people can ask them questions, now has 25 million registered users.

Although he declined to specify how many of those users are active on a regular basis, Formspring CEO Ade Olonoh told me in an interview Monday that one million people post responses on Formspring every day. And an even greater number of people show up at Formspring to check out the Q&A action as spectators: The site sees approximately 40 million monthly unique users, Olonoh told me.

Formspring did not get this large without outside help. The company has raised some $14 million in venture capital since its inception in January 2010 from a host of A-list investors including Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Freestyle Capital, SV Angels, Maples Investments, Chris Sacca, Dave Morin and Kevin Rose.

Formspring has been criticized for providing a forum for teenagers to bully and tease each other while hiding behind the anonymity enabled by the site. But the company has worked overtime in recent months to build up more positive use cases — and a more credible user base. To wit: Marvel Comics senior vice president of publishing Tom Brevoort has used Formspring to answer nearly 900 questions about X-Men, and such celebrities as Enrique Iglesias have created Formspring accounts to interact with their fans.

The company is actively adding more product features and plans to roll out new mobile capabilities in the months ahead. The company is also working on its monetization strategy and should implement some revenue-generating capabilities by year’s end, Olonoh told me. Formspring currently has 27 employees and, like a lot of tech startups in the Valley these days, Olonoh said his company is looking to hire “pretty aggressively,” particularly in its engineering department.

One thing is certain: Formspring seems dedicated to grow beyond its initial status as a popular fad for young people. The company is off to a solid start, but whether its user base will continue to grow along with it remains to be seen.

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The startup allows websites to drop in a simple Urtak poll widget on their sites that can serve as a basic tool for yes/no/don’t-care questions. That in itself enables fast interaction, because the simple structure invites people to plow though questions in quick succession. But the real interesting thing about Urtak is that it invites people to create their own polls on the fly and add it to the existing Urtak poll.

That allows users to not only answer a pre-set list of questions, but by introducing their own inquiries, enables a site to figure out what else their community is thinking about — things the site didn’t even know to ask. Urtak organizes this new information into structured data that’s easy to digest. So what starts off as a very basic conversation can turn into a mound of valuable data that can yield new and sometimes actionable insights.

Urtaks have a long ways to go before they get usage like Disqus or PollDaddy, which are already successful in engaging communities and extracting opinions. But Urtak co-founder Marc Lizoain, who started the company in 2008 with former Harvard buddy Aaron Gibralter, believes their polls have the ability to prompt more engagement than traditional comments and can gather more information than discrete polls and surveys.

“The model of polling and surveying is limited,” said Lizoain. “What we’ve shown is that it’s possible to ask questions, get all this information you want plus all this extra data about what people are thinking with no extra effort.”

A recent Daily Beast/Newsweek Urtak poll conducted on Facebook on the topic of women in the world received back more than 16,000 responses. But it also spawned about 100 questions that explored related areas not covered in the initial poll. Urtak works in the background to serve up the right questions using an algorithm that distributes the questions asked while surfacing better questions more often. Urtak’s polls are extremely popular in Colombia, where the local media and even local politicians use them extensively for quick polling and engagement. It’s also getting more interest in the U.S. and Canada from publishers.

Urtak co-founder Marc Lizoain

Lizoain said he believes Urtaks can be a supplement or alternative to comments, especially for sites looking to create more interactivity with users. Kevin Rose recently used Urtak on Diggnation to figure out what kind of motorcycle to buy and got back more than 11,000 responses as he narrowed his choices. Lizoain said in polls with 10 or fewer questions, more than half of people answer all the questions.

Right now, Urtaks see far more answers than questions in part because it takes a little time for people to realize they can add question to a poll. But a new release of Urtak launching in the coming days will also encourage more questions from users by changing the current ask tab into a permanent button.

Urtak as a business still has to figure out how to make money. It’s also a question of how defensible the concept is and whether others could easily replicate it. But I like the idea because it encourages light weight, almost addictive interaction that is still useful in a lot of ways. It reminds me a little of Opinionaided, a mobile Q&A app that solicits opinions based on images and questions by posed by users. The app has caught on with users because of its simple design, which has prompted 50 million responses to 600,000 questions since it began last year.

I think publishers could see similar engagement online with a tool like Urtak. The polling service could also be really popular with national brands as a form of research. A beverage company could throw out a poll and see what flavors might work but could also receive back responses on flavors suggested by the respondents. Opening up polling to users can invite some messiness and useless responses. But I still like the idea of democratizing surveys and seeing what happens.

“Our goal is that anyone should be able to not only access opinion information but also create it,” Lizoain said. “So many questions that affect people are not being asked and reported. You will never know what you don’t know to ask.”

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The feature, which will roll out in San Francisco first before going nationwide, gives users a quick glimpse at information about the places they visit, shared in a structured format. For instance, users can look up and find the best drinks to order at a restaurant or if it has Wi-Fi. It’s meant to allow users to cut directly to the information they want, rather than reading through longer reviews on sites like Yelp. They can also share the Qs and their answers on Facebook or Twitter.

Users not only read up on answers, they can also contribute answers, which get added in real-time. Answers are meant to be short or in some cases, responses to quick polls. This is aimed at encouraging engagement and content generation by users, so they can add their insights and opinions easily. Right now, the questions are posed by a local Loopt community team.

Loopt Q is interesting for a couple of reasons. By creating a simple structure with pre-populated questions, it lets users join in easily. Most people don’t generate content from scratch, but if it’s done in a painless way, it can elicit responses you might not otherwise get. As I mentioned, other services offer ways for people to leave tips and suggestions. But sometimes users need to be prompted before they’ll answer.

Loopt Qs also offers people the opportunity to get quick information about a place that could really improve their enjoyment there, whether it’s their first time or they’ve been there a while. If the questions are relevant for each location, this could be an interesting and organized way to get some fast insight into what’s good at that location.

Again, tips are good but their value wanes if there’s too many of them and not arranged in an easy way to get through them. That’s one of the lessons of the growing Q&A trend: it helps to enforce some order, something Stack Overflow has used to good effect. Qs also offer the ability to get some real-time insight about a place, which could be helpful if it’s updated frequently. I would love to see if a restaurant was packed or quiet ahead of time, so I could decide if I want to go there.

But Loopt Qs will still need to overcome some hurdles. It needs to be super easy to contribute. It might be best to elicit one-word answers or offer up more polls with simple A,B or C; Up/Down or Yes/No answers. That can work, as we’ve seen from the success of mobile app Opinionaided, which uses a simple poll structure to get responses back. Ask people to write too much and participation will drop. Answers will also have to be good for people to care so perhaps some curation may be needed from the community team. And at some point, Loopt may have to include user questions to keep people engaged though the challenge will be then to organize those so users can still find the most relevant Qs. Loopt still has a lot to do to ensure Qs is a successful feature but it’s got some promise. And it shows that location apps are moving beyond the check-in to provide more utility to users.

[Ooyala=82cWplMjr4-uOX2AeOQWWQreUNVZvMDX]

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Apple Support Communities offers more than just a fairly standard discussion board. It centers on product-specific communities, which are themselves divided into sub-communities depending on the type of support you’re looking for. The site surfaces the most recent content, is based around more of a question-asking model like Quora, a popular social Q&A site, and provides status incentives to help encourage community members to assist their fellow users.

The redesign seems aimed at making support more accessible for new users, and at incorporating more social features to make it easier to give feedback and follow discussions. For example, users can now “Like” any post made in community threads, and you can follow individual communities using a bookmark feature, or by signing up to receive email notifications of new replies. Users can also customize which community feeds appear on their home page quickly and easily using links posted throughout the site.

There’s also a new incentive system that borrows from the recent popularity of gamification. Users can choose which are the most helpful answers, which awards five points to a user, and Apple will sometimes single out a “correct” answer, which grants an additional 10 points. Earning points increases your level, which tops out at level 10 (80,000 points). Apple hasn’t yet revealed what specific privileges are unlocked at each level.

Apple previewed the new site in August last year, but hadn’t made mention of any progress until the new version went live this weekend. My early impressions are that this might be Apple’s most successful foray into social networking yet, or at least the best-designed one. Anyone else agree?

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