People Answer People at Frenzi.com

Posted on September 29, 1999

Frenzi.com has announced the preview launch of its "information trading community," a website for people to trade answers to simple questions. Designed specifically for questions like "How long should I cook chicken on a BBQ?" Frenzi.com provides an incentive system for community members to answer the questions of other members. Each question posted to the site is answered by three other members, and each answer is rated for "usefulness" by the person asking the question. The rating system encourages members to answer only those questions that they know something about.

"The answer community concept works because everybody knows something that someone else would like to know," says CEO Dave Shackleton. "Frenzi.com provides an easy-to-use framework for matching up these people."

In order to encourage members to answer the questions of other members, Frenzi.com uses a virtual currency called "Credits." When a new user joins the website, he or she is given a certain number of Credits to use for asking questions. The Frenzi member can then earn additional Credits by answering questions or performing other tasks like referring friends to the site.

Although the primary mechanism on the site for getting information is posting questions to the community, web users can also browse the database of answered questions. Thousands of questions have already been answered across a broad range of topics. In the future, Shackleton says that the company plans to add additional service lines that are similar to the answer exchange and based on the same interaction model of members trading information with other members.