Have a Question? Twitter-Acquired Fluther May Offer Answers from Real People

Have a Question? Twitter-Acquired Fluther May Offer Answers from Real People

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In case you are wondering Fluther rhymes with brother and it is a word that means a group of jellyfish.  Fluther’s site is about directing your questions to the people who have the answers.  Answerers are encouraged to use humor while expressing their opinions. 

Twitter recently acquired Fluther announcing, “we were continually impressed by their technical talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and much of the thinking behind the question-and-answer product they’ve spent the last couple of years building. When the Fluther team joins us they will focus on helping users discover the most relevant content on Twitter. Their product, Fluther.com, is not part of the acquisition and will remain separate from Twitter. For more information on the future of this Q&A community, please read The Fluther Blog.”

There is a lot of speculation about Twitter’s interest in Fluther.  One of the main things that Twitter may be hoping to add is more of a Question and Answer ability to Twitter. 

TechCrunch author Erick Schonfeld speculated why he thought they may be interested in Fluther:  “Twitter also is about “connecting people who don’t know each other,” at least people who only know each other online for the most part. Social Q&A works better the more people who can potentially answer a given question, but there needs to be some connection, otherwise it’s no different than Yahoo Answers. Whether or not you trust someone’s answer might depend on who else they are connected to. The relevance of a given answer therefore depends on the authority of the person giving the answer, and authority is relative to each questioner. Twitter is already trying to solve the social relevance problems in different ways. Q&A is the next logical step.”