U.S. patent application number 14/276616 was filed with the patent office on 2014-09-04 for facilitating content generation via messaging system interactions.
This patent application is currently assigned to Amazon Technologies, Inc.. The applicant listed for this patent is Amazon Technologies, Inc.. Invention is credited to Kian Fai Leong, Joseph C. Park.
Application Number | 20140249889 14/276616 |
Document ID | / |
Family ID | 38519017 |
Filed Date | 2014-09-04 |
United States Patent
Application |
20140249889 |
Kind Code |
A1 |
Park; Joseph C. ; et
al. |
September 4, 2014 |
FACILITATING CONTENT GENERATION VIA MESSAGING SYSTEM
INTERACTIONS
Abstract
The following disclosure relates generally to techniques for
generating useful content based on user interactions, such as by
enabling users to submit questions to and otherwise interact with
an answer-providing service. In some situations, one or more
interfaces are provided to allow users to specify a variety of
types of questions for the answer-providing service, such as via a
GUI and/or using a messaging interface based on email or other
types of electronic messages. When communications occur via
electronic messages, the answer-providing service may in some
situations generate and include unique tracking identifiers in
electronic messages sent to users, so that the users can reply back
to the messages in order to provide a command to the
answer-providing service that includes a tracking identifier
previously sent to the user and thus verify that the command is
sent by someone with access to the electronic messages of the
user.
Inventors: |
Park; Joseph C.; (Redmond,
WA) ; Leong; Kian Fai; (Singapore, SG) |
|
Applicant: |
Name |
City |
State |
Country |
Type |
Amazon Technologies, Inc. |
Reno |
NV |
US |
|
|
Assignee: |
Amazon Technologies, Inc.
Reno
NV
|
Family ID: |
38519017 |
Appl. No.: |
14/276616 |
Filed: |
May 13, 2014 |
Related U.S. Patent Documents
|
|
|
|
|
|
Application
Number |
Filing Date |
Patent Number |
|
|
11396286 |
Mar 31, 2006 |
8751327 |
|
|
14276616 |
|
|
|
|
60784533 |
Mar 20, 2006 |
|
|
|
Current U.S.
Class: |
705/7.32 |
Current CPC
Class: |
G06Q 10/10 20130101;
G06Q 30/0203 20130101; G06Q 10/107 20130101; G06Q 30/0613
20130101 |
Class at
Publication: |
705/7.32 |
International
Class: |
G06Q 30/02 20060101
G06Q030/02 |
Claims
1-46. (canceled)
47. A computer-implemented method, comprising: receiving, by a
configured computing system, indications of multiple questions
submitted by multiple users, each of the questions being submitted
by one of the multiple users based on one or more electronic
messages received from the one user; for each of the questions,
responding to the question by obtaining, by the configured
computing system, one or more responses to the question from each
of multiple users other than the user who supplied the question;
and identifying, by the configured computing system, at least some
of the obtained responses to be used as an answer to the question;
and providing, by the configured computing system, the answer to
the user who submitted the question as part of one or more
electronic messages sent to the user, at least one of the
electronic messages sent to the user including a tracking
identifier associated with the user by the answer-providing service
to enable the user to later send one or more additional electronic
messages to the answer-providing service that include the tracking
identifier for use by the answer-providing service in determining
that the additional messages are from the user; and receiving, by
the configured computing system, from a user a reply message to an
electronic message previously sent to the user as part of sending
an answer to a question to the user, the reply message including
the tracking identifier included in the previously sent electronic
message and a command from the user that is not specific to the
answer for which the electronic message was previously sent.
48. The method of claim 47 wherein at least some electronic
messages used by users to submit questions are email messages and
wherein a defined messaging interface specifies how one or more
types of information for the question are to be indicated in an
email message.
49. The method of claim 47 wherein a defined messaging interface
for electronic messages used by users to submit questions includes
an application programming interface ("API") that specifies one or
more types of information messages that may be submitted, and
wherein at least some electronic messages used by users to submit
questions are messages sent via the API.
50. The method of claim 47 wherein at least some electronic
messages used by users to submit questions each include an
indication of a question being submitted and additional information
related to the question that is specified in a manner in accordance
with a defined messaging interface.
51. The method of claim 50 wherein the additional information for
each of at least some of the questions includes one or more tags
for the question.
52. The method of claim 51 wherein the additional information for
each of the at least some questions includes an indicated
geographical location related to the question.
53. The method of claim 52 wherein the additional information for
each of the at least some questions includes an indication of at
least one of a desired service and a desired product to be acquired
in the indicated geographical location for the question.
54. The method of claim 47 wherein the providing of the answer for
one of the questions submitted via one or more electronic messages
includes automatically generating the tracking identifier to be
included in at least one of the those electronic messages such that
the generated tracking identifier is unique.
55. The method of claim 47, comprising: receiving from a user a
second reply message to an electronic message previously sent to
the user as part of sending an answer to a question to the user,
the second reply message including the tracking identifier included
in the previously sent electronic message, wherein the second reply
message contains feedback from the user related to the answer for
which the electronic message was previously sent; and determining
to use the feedback based at least in part on the second reply
message including the tracking identifier included in the
previously sent electronic message.
56. The method of claim 47 wherein at least some of the multiple
questions submitted by the multiple users are each associated with
an indication that the user who submitted the question has prepaid
for the question submission, and wherein the command is an
instruction to pre-pay for a specified number of future question
submissions.
57. The method of claim 47 wherein the command from the user is an
instruction to purchase an indicated item for the user.
58. The method of claim 47, comprising determining to perform the
command received from the user based on, after sending a
confirmation request electronic message to the user that includes a
second tracking identifier distinct from the tracking identifier
included in the previously sent electronic message, receiving a
confirmation reply message from the user to the sent confirmation
request electronic message such that the confirmation reply message
includes the second tracking identifier.
59. The method of claim 47 wherein each of the sent electronic
messages has a unique tracking identifier.
60. The method of claim 47, comprising verifying the reply message
includes the tracking identifier included in the previously sent
electronic message.
61. A non-transitory computer-readable medium whose stored contents
configure a computing system to perform a method, the method
comprising: receiving an indication of a request supplied by a
first user via one or more electronic messages; generating a reply
to the request based on one or more responses obtained from one or
more users other than the first user; sending the reply to the
first user via one or more other electronic messages, at least one
of the other electronic messages including a tracking identifier
associated with the first user by the answer-providing service to
enable the first user to later send one or more additional messages
that include information based on the tracking identifier for use
in determining that the additional messages are from the first
user; and after the automatic sending to the first user of the
reply to the request, receiving from the first user a command
message including the tracking identifier and a command unrelated
to the reply to the request.
62. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 61 wherein
the configured computing system performs the method on behalf of an
answer-providing service, wherein the one or more electronic
messages supplied by the first user are each email messages
specified by the first user in accordance with a defined messaging
interface of the answer-providing service, and wherein the
automatic sending of the reply to the first user via one or more
other electronic messages that include the tracking identifier
associated with the first user includes automatically generating a
new tracking identifier unique to the first user and associating
the new tracking identifier with the first user.
63. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 61 wherein
the computer-readable medium is a memory of the configured
computing system and the contents are instructions that when
executed program the configured computing system to perform the
method.
64. A system, comprising: one or more processors of one or more
computing systems; one or more modules that are configured to, when
executed by at least one of the one or more processors, respond to
each of multiple questions that are each supplied by a requester
via one or more electronic messages, by obtaining one or more
responses to the question from one or more users; generating an
answer to the question based on at least one of the obtained
responses; and providing the answer to the requester who supplied
the question as part of one or more electronic messages that
include a generated tracking identifier associated with the
requester for later use in one or more replies sent from the
requester that include the tracking identifier; and respond to an
indication of a command not specific to a response to a previous
question and supplied by a requester via a reply message, the
responding including determining whether the reply message
including the indication of the command also includes the tracking
identifier included in a previously sent electronic message to the
requester supplying the indication of the command.
65. The system of claim 64 wherein the system operates on behalf of
an answer-providing service, wherein at least some of the
requesters are users, wherein the one or more electronic messages
supplied by the requesters are each email messages specified in
accordance with a defined messaging interface of the
answer-providing service, and wherein the providing of the answer
to a requester for each of at least some of the questions includes
generating a new tracking identifier unique to the requester and
associating the new tracking identifier with the requester.
66. The system of claim 64 wherein the one or more modules each
include software instructions for execution by the one or more
processors of the system.
Description
CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
[0001] This application claims the benefit of provisional U.S.
Patent Application No. 60/784,533, filed Mar. 20, 2006 and entitled
"Content Generation Via Messaging System Interactions," which is
hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
[0002] This application is also related to U.S. patent application
Ser. No. ______ (Attorney Docket #120137.528), filed concurrently
and entitled "Facilitating Content Generation Via Paid
Participation"; to U.S. patent application Ser. No. ______
(Attorney Docket #120137.529), filed concurrently and entitled
"Content Generation Revenue Sharing"; and to U.S. patent
application Ser. No. ______ (Attorney Docket #120137.530), filed
concurrently and entitled "Facilitating Content Generation Via
Participant Interactions"; each of which is hereby incorporated by
reference in its entirety.
TECHNICAL FIELD
[0003] The following disclosure relates generally to techniques for
generating useful content based on user interactions, such as by
enabling users to submit questions to and otherwise interact with
an answer-providing service via email or using other messaging
systems.
BACKGROUND
[0004] A common problem that arises is to quickly and cheaply find
accurate and useful information of interest, such as answers to a
wide variety of types of questions. As a result, a variety of
information sources and other ways to locate information of various
types have been developed, but they are often time-consuming and/or
expensive to use, as well as having other problems such as
providing only limited types of information, providing information
that is inaccurate and/or irrelevant, etc. For example,
encyclopedias and reference librarians may provide one possible
source of answers, but can be time-consuming and expensive (if they
are even available), and are limited in the types of information to
which they have access, such as to historical and other reference
information of mass interest. Similarly, while online search
engines more recently are available to provide information of
various types, they often provide information that is inaccurate or
irrelevant, are difficult or impossible for many users to
effectively use, and are also similarly limited in their ability to
retrieve various types of information. For example, such
information sources may be ineffective in providing answers to many
topical and special-interest questions, such as a list of
restaurants of a particular type in a given geographic location
that have provided great service during the prior month,
suggestions on how best to use particular features on a particular
new digital camera that was recently released, or an identification
of a physical store in a geographical area that currently have a
particular item in stock at a price that satisfies specified
criteria.
[0005] Other examples of sources of at least some types of
information include email lists and newsgroups that are devoted to
highly specialized topics, which may allow people to ask questions
and later receive responses related to those topics. However, such
lists or newsgroups typically do not exist for many subjects of
interest, and may be difficult or impossible for infrequent users
to identify if they do exist. Even if an appropriate list or
newsgroup exists and a user with a question locates it, it may be
difficult for many users to submit questions in a form that is
acceptable to specialized culture of the list/newsgroup, and
responses from others may take days (if they occur at all) and may
be hard to find among other activity on the email list or
newsgroup. Moreover, such responses are often inaccurate or
otherwise inappropriate, since there is typically no feedback
mechanism to identify reliable and experienced users (or to
penalize users who intentionally or otherwise provide inappropriate
responses), and there is typically no monetary or other reward to
incentivize the most experienced and diligent users to participate
and provide accurate information. In recent years, specialized
answer services have developed on the Internet, which may allow
questions over varying ranges of topics to be submitted and
answered by paid employees or affiliated researchers, but typically
suffer from at least some of the same drawbacks as email lists and
newsgroups (e.g., limited to only certain topics, responses are
slow, responses may be inaccurate, little or no incentives for the
most experienced users to provide the most accurate and useful
answers, etc.), and may further be costly to use.
[0006] Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a solution that
enables people to easily find information of interest (e.g.,
answers to questions), such as to quickly and cheaply obtain
accurate answers to questions on a wide range of topics.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
[0007] FIG. 1 illustrates interactions between participants as part
on an example embodiment of a system for generating useful
information and providing such information to users.
[0008] FIGS. 2A-2R illustrate examples of interactions between
participants as part of an embodiment of a system for providing
information of interest to users, such as based on use of a
graphical user interface provided by the system and/or based on a
messaging interface provided by the system.
[0009] FIGS. 3A-3C illustrate examples of allocations of rewards to
users who provide responses to questions of other users.
[0010] FIG. 4A-4B illustrate examples of determining portions of an
ongoing revenue stream to be shared with users who provide
responses that are part of a useful answer.
[0011] FIG. 5 is a block diagram illustrating a computing system
suitable for executing an embodiment of a described Rapid Answer
system for providing information of interest to users.
[0012] FIG. 6 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of a
Requester User Interaction Manager routine.
[0013] FIG. 7 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of a
Response Provider User Interaction Manager routine.
[0014] FIG. 8 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Reward Allocation Manager routine.
[0015] FIG. 9 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of a
Revenue Stream Share Determination Manager routine.
[0016] FIG. 10 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Categorization Manager routine.
[0017] FIG. 11 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Experience Level Incentive Manager routine.
[0018] FIG. 12 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Item Provider User Interaction Manager routine.
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
[0019] Techniques are described that facilitate generating useful
content based on user interactions, such as by providing an
answer-providing service that facilitates interactions between
users who supply questions and users who supply responses to the
questions of other users, as well as using the generated content in
various ways. In at least some embodiments, one or more interfaces
are provided to allow users to specify a variety of types of
questions for the answer-providing service, such as via a graphical
user interface ("GUI") from a Web site of the answer-providing
service and/or using a messaging interface based on email or other
types of electronic messages. Various users of the answer-providing
service may then view supplied questions and rapidly provide
responses, with the responses of multiple users being aggregated or
otherwise combined to generate answers for the questions in at
least some embodiments. In at least some embodiments, the response
provider users who provide responses to questions are unrelated to
the question requester users who provide the questions, and both
sets of users may be unrelated to the answer-providing service
other than being registered for the purposes of making question
requests and/or providing question responses.
[0020] In at least some embodiments, users may be compensated and
otherwise incentivized for participating in interactions with the
answer-providing service in various ways. For example, one or more
response provider users who each provide one or more responses for
use as part of an answer to a question from another user may in at
least some embodiments be rewarded in a manner specific to the
question and their response(s), such as to split a total amount of
monetary reward for the question between the response provider
users and/or to split experience points related to the question
between the response provider users. In addition, in at least some
embodiments a portion of an ongoing revenue stream that is later
generated from or otherwise associated with the answer may be
shared with the response provider users who provided the responses.
As discussed in greater detail below, the splitting of a monetary
and/or experience point reward for responses to a question between
the response provider users who provided the responses may be
performed in various manners in various embodiments, including
based at least in part on the uniqueness of the provided responses
and/or other measure of the usefulness of the provided responses
(e.g., based in part on feedback from the requester user who
supplied the question and/or other response provider users who
provided responses to the question). Similarly, as discussed in
greater detail below, the sharing of an ongoing revenue stream
related to an answer may be split between the response provider
users who provided the responses used in the answer in various
manners in various embodiments, including based on assessed levels
of expertise of those response provider users (e.g., as may be
measured using a relative amount of experience points allocated to
those users based on previously submitting responses to questions).
In addition, in at least some embodiments the response provider
users with the highest levels of expertise and past participation
(e.g., as may be measured using previously allocated experience
points for those users) are incentivized to continue participating
by assigning one or more enhanced incentive levels to at least some
such users, and then providing additional benefits of various types
to users having such enhanced status (e.g., to increase the amount
of ongoing revenue stream share of an enhanced status user, such as
by extending the amount of time that the revenue stream share
occurs; to provide additional types of functionality to facilitate
responding to questions, such as by providing notifications to
enhanced status users of supplied questions meeting specified
criteria; etc.). Various other techniques may similarly be used to
incentivize high-quality responses and the continued participation
of the most valuable users in at least some embodiments, as well as
to generate types of content other than answers to questions, as
discussed in greater detail below.
[0021] In at least some embodiments, answers may be categorized in
various ways and for various purposes, such as to allow users to
easily locate and/or access previously-answered questions in a
particular category, and to assist in tracking and evaluating the
expertise of response provider users in a manner specific to
particular categories. In some embodiments, the categorizing of an
answer is performed based at least in part on input supplied by the
requester user who supplied the question associated with the answer
and/or on input supplied by the response provider users who supply
responses used as part of the answer. For example, in some
embodiments a requester user who supplies a question may indicate
one or more tags related to the question, and those tags may be
used as user-designated categories for the question and its
subsequent answer (e.g., as part of a group of free-form categories
that are incrementally developed based on user input).
Subsequently, the one or more categories for a question from the
requester-supplied tag(s) may assist response provider users in
identifying the question as being of interest to answer. In
addition, response provider users may supply one or more other tags
for the question and its answers, which similarly may be used as
user-designated categories (e.g., by selecting one or more of the
most popular tags supplied by all of the response provider users).
Categorizing of answers may further be based in at least some
embodiments by comparing answers (and their constituent responses)
to the answers of other questions, such as to cluster or group
similar answers and to combine or otherwise group related tags or
other category information for answers that are sufficiently
similar. Such grouped or otherwise related tags and other category
information may further be used in various manners in various
embodiments, such as to suggest appropriate tags to requester users
and/or to response provider users based on the suggested tags being
related to user-supplied tags and/or other information associated
with an answer (e.g., text of the question corresponding to the
answer). Additional details related to categorizing of answers are
included below.
[0022] In some embodiments, other users of the answer-providing
service may provide information that is related to specific
questions and answers, such as by allowing item provider users
(e.g., representatives of merchants) to pay in order to have their
responses or other information (e.g., advertisements) included in
the answers of questions that the item provider users select, such
as part of a pay-per-response functionality in which an item
provider user affirmatively responds for each question of interest
that indicated information is to be included in the answer for the
question before the item provider user is charged for the
information inclusion. While the item provider users who pay to
include information in answers for selected questions are typically
distinct from the response provider users who are compensated or
otherwise rewarded for providing responses for questions, in some
embodiments there may be overlap between groups of users such that
a single user performs multiple roles at different times (e.g., to
at times act as a requester user, as a response provider user, as
an item provider user on behalf of one or more item providers, and
as a viewer user). Such items may include products, services and/or
information that are available for purchase, rent, lease, license,
trade, evaluation, sampling, subscription to, etc., whether from a
physical brick-and-mortar merchant at a particular geographical
location or from a Web store of an online merchant or another type
of electronic marketplace (e.g., for electronic ordering and
delivery via appropriate physical distribution channels or
electronically as appropriate, such as shipment via a governmental
postal service or private common carrier for physical products, or
such as via download over the Internet for digital products such as
digital music, videos, or e-books). Correspondingly, the item
providers provide such items to others, and may include
product-oriented and/or service-oriented businesses or other
organizations or entities, with an item provider user being a user
who is a representative of an item provider or who otherwise acts
on behalf of an item provider. In particular, in some embodiments
an item provider user may indicate criteria of interest for use in
automatically identifying matching questions and a specified bid or
other monetary amount for use with pay-per-response functionality,
such that the item provider user desires to receive an option for
each of the matching questions to provide a response in exchange
for payment from the item provider user of the specified monetary
amount if the item provider user so elects. Question matching
criteria may be specified in various ways, including keywords to
match tags and/or categories that are associated with an answer (or
its corresponding question before the answer is generated), or to
instead match other information associated with a question/answer,
such as to directly match the question content (e.g., the text of
the question) and/or to match metadata related to the requester
user who provided the question (e.g., the geographic location of
the requester user) and/or one or more response provider users who
respond to the question in other than a pay-per-response manner.
When a given question matches previously specified criteria of one
or more item provider users, at least some of the one or more item
provider users that specified the criteria may each be notified of
the question as well as possibly an option to provide a response to
the question in exchange for payment (e.g., a monetary amount that
was previously bid or offered by the item provider user).
Additional details related to actions of item provider users and
pay-per-response functionality are discussed in greater detail
below.
[0023] FIG. 1 illustrates interactions between participants as part
on an example embodiment of a system for generating useful
information and providing such information to users, such as by
illustrating examples of various data flow between an embodiment of
a Rapid Answer answer-providing system 111, requester users 101 who
provide question requests, and response provider users 105 who
provide responses to the questions for use in the questions'
answers. In this example embodiment, other participants are also
illustrated, including item provider users 107 who provide
responses or other information for some questions and/or answers on
a pay-per-response basis, viewer users 103 who access and review
previously supplied answers to others' questions, advertisers 121
who pay to provide advertisements to be included with at least some
questions and/or answers (e.g., those supplied to the viewer users)
and thus provide ongoing revenue streams related to those questions
and answers, and a revenue generation system 113 that interacts
with the advertisers to generate revenue based on the generated
answers and other generated content of the Rapid Answer system.
Revenue may be generated from the advertisements provided by the
advertisers 121 in various ways, such as by displaying
advertisements along with questions and/or answers, and with the
revenue for the advertisements reflecting a fixed fee or instead
one or more types of usage-based models reflecting use of the
advertisements. For example, the usage-based models may include a
pay-per-click model (e.g., advertisers only pay for advertisements
that are selected by viewing users), a pay-per-impression model
(e.g., advertisers pay for every advertisement that is displayed),
a pay-per-sales model (e.g., advertisers only pay for
advertisements that result in actual sales), etc. Revenue may also
be generated in other ways, including payments received from
requester users and/or item provider users, sponsored links,
etc.
[0024] In this example, the Rapid Answer system 111 and the revenue
generation system 113 are both provided by the same entity as part
of the systems 110 of that provider, and the systems 110 may in
some embodiments contain additional systems or components that are
not shown, such as a payment system or systems for other services.
Various messages may occur between the illustrated systems and
users, and may be performed in various ways in various embodiments
(e.g., in an interactive manner based on one or more GUIs of the
Rapid Answer system; based on an exchange of messages using email
or other types of electronic messaging, such as IM ("instant
messaging"), SMS ("short message service") or MMS ("multimedia
messaging service"); in a programmatic manner based on electronic
communications sent via one or more APIs ("application programming
interfaces"), such as based on Web services; etc.).
[0025] In addition to supplying question requests, requester users
may each further interact with the Rapid Answer system in various
ways in at least some embodiments, such as by receiving answers to
their questions, providing feedback related to the answers (e.g.,
to provide positive or negative feedback related to particular
responses and/or response provider users), and viewing information
about a user account of the requester user with the Rapid Answer
system.
[0026] In addition to supplying responses to others' question in
exchange for compensation or other rewards, response provider users
may each interact with the Rapid Answer system in various ways in
at least some embodiments, such as by identifying supplied
questions of interest that are not yet answered (e.g., questions in
categories in which the response provider user has expertise or
would like to expand their expertise), providing feedback related
to questions and answers (e.g., proposed tags or other category
information for questions to which they are responding, positive or
negative feedback regarding responses and/or proposed
tags/categories of other response provider users, etc.), and
receiving a share of ongoing revenue streams generated for
questions to which they previously responded.
[0027] In addition to paying to include information in answers to
questions that are individually selected, item provider users may
each interact with the Rapid Answer system in various ways in at
least some embodiments, such to designate categories or other
criteria related to questions for which the item provider user
desires an opportunity to elect to provide a response or other
information in exchange for a designated payment (e.g., questions
related to items that the item provider user sells or otherwise
provides), receive notifications of options to respond to
particular questions and to optionally respond to those questions
in exchange for designated payment from the item provider user, and
provide payment of money or other items of value to reflect
elections by the item provider user to provide responses for
particular questions. Item provider users may be distinguished from
response provider users in various ways, including that item
provider users may pay to provide responses to others' questions
whereas response provider users may be paid or otherwise rewarded
(e.g., by obtaining experience points) for providing responses to
others' questions.
[0028] Viewer users may each interact with the Rapid Answer system
in various ways in various embodiments, such as by accessing and
viewing previously answered questions of others that may optionally
be accompanied by advertisements. Advertisers may include the
actual parties on whose behalf the advertisements are shown, as
well as brokers or other intermediates who act on behalf of others
(e.g., via affiliate programs, or by acting as a service that sells
advertising), and may similarly each interact with the Rapid Answer
system and/or a related system (e.g., a revenue generation system)
in various ways in various embodiments.
[0029] For illustrative purposes, some embodiments are described
below in which various specific types of content are generated in
various specific ways based on specific types of interactions with
users, such as by providing incentives to encourage response
provider users to provide answers to questions, by providing
pay-per-response functionality in which item provider users pay to
provide responses to questions, and by categorizing answers in
various ways to facilitate access by various users. However, it
will be understood that the described techniques can be used in a
wide variety of other situations, and that the inventive techniques
can be used in a wide variety of other situations, including to
generate other types of contents based on other types of
interactions with users.
[0030] FIGS. 2A-2K illustrate examples of interactions between an
embodiment of the Rapid Answer answer-providing system and various
types of users, such as via a GUI provided by an embodiment of the
Rapid Answer system. In particular, FIG. 2A illustrates an example
GUI screen or page (e.g., a Web page) from which a requester user
can initiate submission of a question to be answered. The example
display includes an information section 201 related to overall
operation of the rapid answer system, a section 203 in which a
requester user can specify a question, a user-selectable control
205 with which a requester user can initiate submission of a
question specified in section 203, and overview information 207
about numerous popular user-supplied categories 209 (e.g., based on
recent questions). The information section 201 in this example
provides details about the number of response provider users (also
referred to as "agents") that are currently online and ready to
respond to questions, an average response time to provide a
completed answer for a question, and an indication of a volume of
transactions that have occurred, and additional related information
may also be displayed in some embodiments (e.g., the number of
viewer users or number of open questions that are available to be
answered). The categories 209 may be organized in various manners
(e.g., by alphabetical order, by popularity, etc.), and in some
embodiments may be only a single word, while in other embodiments
phrases such as "food and dining" may be used as a category. In
addition, in at least some embodiments in which users are permitted
to specify free-form categories, the categories may include
misspelled words (e.g., as part of the displayed "food &
dinning" category) or highly unusual words, but such categories
will typically quickly fall in relative popularity to other
categories that are used more frequently, and in other embodiments
such unusual categories may not be used (e.g., by performing a
spell-check and/or other analysis of user-supplied categories, by
selecting categories from a predefined list or hierarchy,
etc.).
[0031] FIG. 2B illustrates an example GUI screen or page that is
displayed to a requester user to provide various details related to
a question being submitted, such as after selection of the
user-selectable control 205 of FIG. 2A. In addition, while not
illustrated here, in some embodiments a requester user may be
prompted to sign on to the Rapid Answer system prior to or during
submission of a question request, such as if the user has an
established account with the Rapid Answer system to track
information about financial information for the user, past user
activities with the system, user preferences, etc. In this example,
various sections of the GUI are displayed to prompt the requester
user to provide various information, including to specify a
question to be answered in section 213 (which may be automatically
filled in with the question text entered in section 203 in FIG.
2A), to provide a summary of the question in section 215, to
provide a time limit for completing an answer for the question in
section 217, and to specify a reward in section 219 that will be
provided to at least some response provider users who provide
responses that are used in the answer to the question. The example
GUI also includes a section 221 in which the requester user can
specify one or more tags for use in categorizing the question, such
as tags to be used as the categories in such embodiments, or tags
to be used to select related existing categories in other
embodiments. In addition, in the illustrated example tags may also
be suggested in section 223 (e.g., to reflect popular existing tags
or other categories), such as based at least in part on words in
the question text and/or summary, and a user-selectable control 225
may be used to submit the question to the Rapid Answer system and
to be made available to response provider users.
[0032] In at least some embodiments, when a time limit is specified
by a requester user, the Rapid Answer system may take various
actions to provide an answer within that time, such as to close
availability of the question to additional response provider users
and responses near or at the end of the time limit even if fewer
than a predetermined or requested number of responses have been
received or if fewer than a predetermined (e.g., 10) or requested
number of response provider users have responded. In addition, a
requester user may be able to offer a reward for an answer to a
submitted question in various ways in various embodiments, such as
to specify a monetary amount to be paid and/or an amount of Rapid
Answer system points to be provided, or instead each question may
be assessed an amount of money and/or a number of points by the
Rapid Answer system (e.g., with the reward for each question being
the same, or with the reward instead varying based on the
categories for the question and/or other information related to the
question). As discussed in greater detail below, a reward that
includes Rapid Answer system points may provide various types of
benefits to response provider users, and a requester user may
obtain such points to be provided in various ways (e.g., by
receiving a specified amount of points for free, such as an initial
allocation or a recurring number of points for each successive
specified time period; by purchasing them for monetary payment; by
earning them based on other activities of the requester users;
etc.) In addition, in at least some embodiments both the question
and the summary may be limited to a predetermined number of
characters (e.g., 959 characters for the question and 85 for the
summary), and a summary separate from the question may not be used
in at least some situations (e.g., if the question text is
sufficiently short). Additional information may also be supplied or
specified in some embodiments, such as a geographic location of the
requester user, or criteria related to which response provider
users provide responses (e.g., specified desired or required
qualifications of the response provider users, such as an
experience level or other qualification; an indication that the
response provider users have previously performed some indicated
task or action, such as to have answered indicated related prior
questions; etc.) and/or how the answer for the question is to be
generated. Requester users may in some embodiments make the reward
dependent on the time to obtain an answer, such that the requester
user pays a premium to have the question answered sooner rather
than later.
[0033] FIG. 2C illustrates an example GUI screen or page that
displays a portion of the answer to a question, such as to the
requester user who submitted the question. In particular, the
example information includes a status indicator 231 to indicate the
status of completion of the answer, one or more graphical
advertisements 233, one or more sponsored textual links 235, an
image 237 of the requester user who submitted the question,
question information 239, reward information 241, a summary section
243 about the responses that make up the answer, a user-selectable
control 245 to sort the responses, a first 247 of the question
responses that make up the answer, and user-selectable controls 249
to provide feedback about the answer. In this example, the
requester user may provide feedback to indicate that a particular
response is the best of all responses, is lame (e.g., irrelevant,
off-topic, poorly written, etc.) or otherwise unhelpful, or is
abusive (e.g., includes offensive language, is wholly unrelated to
the question, or otherwise violates any rules or conditions
associated with provided responses), although in other embodiments
other types of feedback may instead be permitted (e.g., a relative
and/or absolute ranking of various of the responses with respect to
one or more attributes being measured, such as usefulness; a
ranking of one or more of the response provider users based on
their responses; etc.). In some embodiments, the sponsored links
and/or graphical advertisements may be from item provider users
and/or from other sources, such as advertisers, while in other
embodiments the information provided by item provider users will
instead be similar to or identical to the types of responses that
are received from response provider users, and may be displayed
together with those other responses. In addition, the information
that is displayed may vary in other embodiments, such as to not
display the requester user image and/or various details of the
question (e.g., the question text or associated metadata such as
tags or other categories, the summary, etc.).
[0034] In some embodiments, the requester user who asked the
question may view responses as the responses are incrementally
received by the Rapid Answer system, while in other embodiments the
response information is not provided to the requester user until
the question has been fully answered (i.e., all responses to the
question have been received and any aggregation or other processing
of the responses has been completed). In embodiments in which other
users may view such answers, such as a viewer user, the displayed
information may be similar but may lack some details, such as the
ability to provide feedback about the answer or to incrementally
receive responses as they are received. In addition, in at least
some embodiments, users other than the requester user who submitted
the question may only obtain information about the question and its
answer after the answer has been completed, such as to prevent
potential or actual response provider users from obtaining
information about responses provided by other response provider
users. Furthermore, in some embodiments at least some requester
users may receive only a single response to a submitted question,
such as the only response that is supplied by a single response
provider user, or instead a single response that is one of multiple
responses supplied by one or more response provider users, such as
one response that is selected as the best or that is otherwise
preferred over the other responses based on specified criteria
(e.g., the first response received by the Rapid Answer system, the
response from the response provider user with the highest enhanced
status, the response for which an item provider user is willing to
pay the most and/or for which a response provider user is willing
to perform for the least reward, etc.).
[0035] FIG. 2D illustrates an example GUI screen or page that
allows a response provider user to identify currently open
questions that are available to the response provider user to
select for providing responses. In particular, in this example the
displayed information includes a section 253 in which the response
provider user can specify information for a search of available
questions (such as based on a search of tags or other categories,
of text of the questions, and/or of any other metadata associated
with the question); a user-selectable control 255 to sort or
arrange open questions by tag or other category information;
user-selectable controls 257 to control which open questions are
included in the displayed list 259 and to control a level of detail
that is shown for each question, and an indication 251 related to
the response provider user's account and/or past activity (in this
example to illustrate an amount of money earned from providing
responses to questions so far during the current month). Each of
the displayed questions currently include various details that
include a summary, tags or other category information, the
requester user for the question, a maximum associated reward for
all responses to the question, a time remaining to answer the
question, and a user-selectable control to initiate a process of
providing one or more responses for the question. The response
provider user may in at least some embodiments be able to search
for and/or sort questions in a variety of ways, such as by one or
more categories, by time remaining to answer the question, by the
value of the reward, by one or more geographic locations associated
with the questions, etc. User-selectable controls may also be
available in at least some embodiments to control a level of detail
that is displayed for each question, and in some embodiments
selected open questions may be automatically displayed to the
response provider user by default (e.g., to reflect areas of
expertise and/or specified preferences of the response provider
user). In addition, when a question becomes currently unavailable
(e.g., due to a maximum time having expired or a maximum number of
response provider users having selected the question to provide
responses), the question may in some embodiments no longer be
displayed to response provider users, while in other embodiments
the question may be displayed but the response provider user may
not be allowed to select to provide response(s) to the
question.
[0036] FIG. 2E illustrates an example GUI screen or page that
allows a response provider user to provide one or more responses to
an open question. In particular, in this example the displayed
information includes various information 263 related to the
unanswered question (such as the question details, tags or other
category information, associated monetary reward, and time
remaining before expiration, as well as in this example to provide
status information about a current degree of completion of the
answering process), a section 265 via which question clarifications
can be requested and viewed, a section 277 with which the response
provider user can specify one or more tags for use as possible
categories to associate with the answer, and information 261
related to the current response provider user's account and/or past
activity (in this example to illustrate an amount of money earned
from providing responses to questions so far during the current
month). In addition, the displayed information includes various
sections via which the response provider user can supply one or
more responses for the question, including a section 267 with which
the response provider user can specify a URL of a site having
information related to the answer, a section 269 in which the
response provider user can specify a phone number related to the
question (e.g., the phone number of an item provider related to the
question, such as in this example to include a phone number of a
local store in Los Angeles that has Xbox 360 items available), a
section 271 to indicate that a response being provided is the
response provider user's opinion (with the opinion being specified
in a summary section 273 and a details section 275), and a
user-selectable control 279 to submit one or more responses that
have been specified.
[0037] In some embodiments, various additional types of information
sources or other types of responses may be provided, and the Rapid
Answer system may further assist response provider users in various
ways, such as by indicating potentially helpful Web sites (e.g.,
based on URLs from previous answers with the same or similar
categories, or based on being generally useful reference sites). In
addition, in some embodiments a response provider user may be able
to reserve a phone number (e.g., for use as a response to the
current question, such as while the response provider user is
preparing additional response information for the current question,
or instead for future use with other responses), such as if a
particular phone number may only be submitted by one response
provider user for each question in some embodiments. In this
example embodiment, the Rapid Answer system also allows response
provider users to ask for clarifications from the requester user
who submitted the question, such as if the requester user left out
important information or if the question is too broad to be
reasonably answered, and any clarifications received may be visible
to all actual and/or potential response provider users.
[0038] Although in this example space is provided for one URL
and/or one phone number, in some embodiments a response provider
user may be able to supply multiple URLs, phone numbers, and/or
other sources of information, such as other types of contact
information (e.g., street and/or mailing addresses, e-mail
addresses, etc.). Furthermore, in some embodiments a response
provider user may need to provide his/her entire group of multiple
responses to the question together at a single time, while in other
embodiments the response provider user may be able to submit
responses at multiple times. In addition, in some embodiments the
responses may need to be formatted in specific manners, such as to
format a phone number as (###) ###-####--in such embodiments, an
example may be provided and/or client-side scripting (e.g.,
JavaScript) may be used to dynamically monitor and optionally
modify a response so that it is in the correct format. In some
embodiments, the Rapid Answer system may similarly restrict some
responses for various reasons (e.g., to restrict inappropriate
answers), such as to not accept aliased URLs that will redirect a
browser to a different URL. In addition, the system may have
various security measures to prevent spamming of responses with
off-topic advertisements or other responses.
[0039] While not illustrated here, in some embodiments response
provider users may provide responses that utilize additional types
of content, such as various forms of multimedia content (e.g.,
images, audio, video, etc.), active content (e.g., implemented by
the use of applets, plug-ins, scripts or other executable code),
and/or links to or other indications of content (e.g., a URL link,
instructions for locating/obtaining the content, access information
for use in obtaining access, etc.) provided by one or more sources
external to the answer-providing service of the Rapid Answer
system. Various technologies may be utilized to provide such
functionality, including, but not limited to, JavaScript, Java
Applets, Macromedia Flash, ActiveX, and AJAX. Such additional types
of content may be used in various ways, including to provide
interactive maps, weather reports, traffic conditions, calendars,
reservation services (e.g., for restaurants, entertainment, travel,
etc.), community-based content (e.g., wikis, online communities,
etc.), ranking and other reputation-related services, etc. Such
additional types of content may also be generated by a response
provider user for a particular response in various ways, including
in some embodiments by using a set of standardized tools, modules,
and/or development environments that are provided by the Rapid
Answer system. For example, in some embodiments the Rapid Answer
system may provide multiple content-specific modules that may each
be selected and configured by a response provider user to provide a
particular piece of content of a particular type as part of a
response, such as a map module, a calendar module, a restaurant
reservation module, etc. Other embodiments may provide a toolkit
and/or API that allows response provider users (and/or third-party
developers) to implement and provide custom content modules for use
by response provider users and inclusion as part of responses. In
some embodiments, facilities for the generation and transfer of
licensing fees for custom content modules may also be provided,
such as for a third-party developer that provides a custom content
module to receive fees from response provider users who use the
module (e.g., fees that may be automatically deducted from any fees
awarded to such response provider users from use of the
module).
[0040] The incorporation of various forms of content by response
provider users in responses may also give rise to various legal
issues, including copyright and trademark, such as based on how and
when the content was generated. For example, if a response provider
user includes content of one or more defined types (e.g., images,
audio or video clips, etc.) as part of a response, the Rapid Answer
system may in some embodiments attempt to gain assurance that the
response provider user has rights to provide the content. Such
assurance may be provided by, for example, an affirmative
indication by the response provider user that he/she has the
authority to provide the content, by specifying terms and
conditions for use of the Rapid Answer system that only authorized
content may be provided, by warranties or other guarantees provided
by the response provider user, etc. Other embodiments may provide
mechanisms by which potential rights-holders can provide notice to
response provider users and/or the operators of the Rapid Answer
system of potential rights violations, such as to allow
unauthorized content to promptly be removed or otherwise
handled.
[0041] FIG. 2F illustrates an example of a GUI screen or page that
displays various details about an account of a response provider
user with the Rapid Answer system, including indications of any
preferred or otherwise enhanced status of the response provider
user (e.g., based on reaching one or more incentive levels related
to amount of expertise of the response provider user). In
particular, in this example the displayed information includes a
navigation section 281 with links to various groups of information,
a reward section 283 that includes information about monetary and
expertise point rewards earned by the user, a profile section 285
that includes various information about the user, an awards section
287 that indicates enhanced status of the user based on incentive
levels reached regarding expertise in several categories, a
notification section 291 with which the user can specify criteria
regarding types of open questions of interest (e.g., criteria to
identify matching questions, including categories and/or keywords,
and criteria regarding how/when notification of matching questions
is to occur), and a ranking section 289 indicating relative
rankings of the user's expertise in various categories. In this
example, several enhanced status levels are available, such as
labeled "silver" and "gold" in this example, with the higher "gold"
level providing all of the benefits of the lower "silver" level in
addition to other benefits. For example, by being in the top 25% of
level of expertise of response provider users for a particular
category, a response provider user may earn "silver" status and
receive various benefits (e.g., an extension of a default amount of
time of 12 months to 18 months for sharing ongoing revenue streams
for answers in which the response provider user participated, an
ability to specify and receive notifications when questions become
available that match specified criteria, etc.), and by being in the
top 10% of level of expertise of response provider users for a
particular category a response provider user may earn "gold" status
and receive various additional benefits (e.g., an extension of the
default amount of time of 12 months to 24 months for sharing
ongoing revenue streams for answers in which the response provider
user participated, a more sophisticated ability to specify and
receive notifications when questions become available that match
specified criteria, etc.).
[0042] In some embodiments, similar types of information may be
displayed for other types of users, such as requester users and/or
item provider users. For example, requester users may be provided
with information to enable retrieval of questions that the
requester user has previously asked or viewed, to view points
and/or money spent asking questions, etc., and item provider users
may be able to see the amount of money spent to provide their
responses and/or answers that include their responses. In addition,
if an individual user plays different roles in the system, the user
may be able to view all their account information at once or to
instead switch between roles as indicated.
[0043] FIG. 2G illustrates an example GUI screen or page that
allows viewer users to identify answered questions of interest,
such as by browsing categories. In particular, in this example the
displayed information includes an answer section 295 and a related
categories section 293, with the answer section showing various
details for each of several question/answer pairs in a "J2EE"
category (e.g., the summary of the question, the requester user who
supplied the question, and the categories associated with the
answer). The answer section may include additional information in
other embodiments, such as indications of the response provider
users who provided responses used in the answer and/or one or more
of various details related to the answer. The related categories
section 293 shows categories that are related to the current
category, such as may also be of interest to the viewer user and
may be determined in various ways in various embodiments (e.g.,
based on sharing overlapping tags, such as if each category may
have multiple associated tags; based on answers and/or other
information related to the categories being sufficiently similar,
based on the categories being related as part of a hierarchy or
other inter-relationship, etc.).
[0044] FIG. 2H illustrates an example GUI screen or page 200 that
allows an item provider user to specify information related to
questions that are of interest and for which the item provider user
is willing to pay in order to include information as part of the
questions' answers if the item provider user so elects on a
per-question basis. In particular, in this example the displayed
information includes a profile section 202, a question matching
criteria section 206, and a question matching notification
mechanism section 212. The profile section 202 includes contact
information 204a and payment information 204b in this example. In
some embodiments, at least some of the contact information will
automatically be provided as part or all of the item provider
user's paid response to a question. The billing information 204b
displays accumulated charges reflecting the amount of money the
item provider user has paid and/or promised to pay for responses
that the item provider user has elected to provide to supplied
questions.
[0045] The question matching criteria section 206 in this example
includes multiple groups of question matching criteria 210a-e that
each identify a distinct set of questions of interest, with each
criteria group including a category field 208a, a keywords field
208b, and a bid field 208c. In this example, the criteria will be
used to determine to notify the item provider user of a given
question supplied by a requester user if the question matches one
of the criteria groups and if the bid is sufficiently high (e.g.,
is the highest bid of any matching group of criteria of any item
provider user, is within the top X highest such bids where X is a
predetermined number), although in other embodiments other factors
may additionally be used (e.g., whether an item provider user has a
preferred or premium status, such as based on past interactions
with the Rapid Answer system and/or based on payment for such
status; whether the item provider user frequently elects to
exercise options of which the user is notified; etc.). In the
illustrated embodiment, a given group of criteria matches a
question when the category displayed in the category field 208a is
identical to the category of the supplied question and all of the
keywords displayed in the keywords field 208b appear somewhere in
the question text, metadata associated with the question, and/or
metadata associated with the requester user who supplied the
question (e.g., geographic location, demographic information,
etc.). For example, in criteria 210a the item provider user has
expressed interest in questions of any category (as illustrated by
the use of "<any>") that match the keywords "Seattle" and
"plumber". In criteria 210b, the item provider user has expressed
interest in questions in the "Plumbing" category that also match
the keyword "Seattle." In criteria 210c, the item provider user has
expressed interest in questions in any category that match the
keywords "plumbing" and "leak". In criteria 210d, the item provider
user has expressed interest in questions in the "Plumbing"
category. In criteria 210e, the item provider user has expressed
interest in questions in any category that match the keyword
"pipes".
[0046] Various approaches for matching questions with question
matching criteria are contemplated. For example, in various
embodiments the supplied category and/or keywords may be matched
individually and combined in various manners to determine a
potential match. Some embodiments may provide a hierarchy of
categories (e.g., super-categories containing one or more
sub-categories), and determine a category match only when either a
category specified by an item provider user is identical to the
question category or when the specified category is a
super-category of the question category. Such embodiments may elect
not to determine a category match when the specified category is a
sub-category of the question category, because by specifying a more
specialized category, the item provider user may indicate that they
are not interested in questions containing generalized subject
matter. In addition, various embodiments may employ various
techniques when comparing keywords specified by item provider users
to the supplied question, such as word stemming, approximate
matching, regular expression matching, etc. Furthermore, various
approaches to combining multiple keywords, keyword matches, and/or
category matches are contemplated, such as by way of various
logical operators such as "and", "or", etc. In addition, the
various techniques described above may be configurable and/or
selectable by the item provider user, such as by providing the item
provider user with the ability to specify keywords using regular
expression syntax and/or allowing the user to select from various
logical operators that should be used to combine various category
and keyword matches.
[0047] Each of the illustrated criteria 210a-e also includes a bid
field 208c. In the illustrated embodiment, the item provider user
may utilize the bid field 208c in order to express an amount of
money that he/she is willing to pay if he/she elects to provide a
response to a question that matches the associated criteria. For
example, if a question matches criteria 210b (category "Plumbing"
and keywords "Seattle"), the item provider user has expressed that
they are willing to pay $0.70 if they choose to provide a response
to that question. If, on the other hand, a question matches
criteria 210e (any category and keywords "pipes"), the item
provider user has expressed that they are willing to pay only $0.10
if they choose to provide a response to that question. The
differences in values expressed in the various criteria may reflect
the fact that a given item provider user more strongly values more
specific matches than more general matches. For example, questions
that match criteria 210e may include plumbing-related questions as
well as car-related (e.g., "exhaust pipes") and tobacco-related
(e.g., "tobacco pipes") questions, and therefore not be as
worthwhile for an item provider user in the plumbing business.
[0048] The amount of money that a given item provider user
indicates that they are willing to pay to provide a response may be
utilized in various ways. For example, some embodiments may
preferentially notify item provider users who have bid greater
amounts of money for given criteria. For example, supposing that
multiple item provider users have each bid on criteria that match a
given question, some embodiments may elect to only notify some
subset of those item provider users based at least in part on the
amount of money that each item provider user has respectively bid.
The subset of item provider users may be selected in various
manners, including but not limited to, selecting the highest
bidder; selecting some number of high bidders, where the number is
a predetermined number or percentage of the total number of
matching bidders; randomly selecting some number of bidders (e.g.,
with the probability of selecting a given item provider user being
weighted by the amount of their bid, such that higher bidders are
more likely to be selected); etc. In addition, the amount of money
that item provider users are actually charged for providing
responses may be based in part on the amount of money they bid for
matching criteria. For example, in some embodiments item provider
users who provide information for answers will be charged the
amount that they bid for the criteria that matched the question,
while in other embodiments such item provider users may be charged
other amounts of money (e.g., the lowest amount, or the average
amount bid by all of the item provider users who match, are
notified, or elect to submit information for inclusion in the
answer).
[0049] The question matching notification mechanism 212 in this
example includes multiple selectable notification mechanisms
214a-c, including via email, IM, and phone (e.g., automatically,
such as by an IVR, or Interactive Voice Response, system). By
specifying and selecting at least one of the notification
mechanisms, the item provider user may control how he/she receives
notification of a question that has matched at least one of the
question matching criteria 210a-e. Additional notification
mechanisms are contemplated, including via text messages (e.g.,
Short Message Service messages sent to mobile telephones), paging,
news feeds, etc.
[0050] FIG. 2I illustrates an example GUI screen or page 220 that
allows an item provider user to select whether he/she wishes to
provide a paid response to a particular question supplied by a
requester user. A response provided by the item provider user may
be included in an answer that may also include one or more
responses from various response provider users, as illustrated in
FIG. 2K. In this example, the displayed information includes a
question section 222 with information about a question that matches
criteria previously supplied by the item provider user (although in
other embodiments at least some such questions may instead be
automatically identified for an item provider user without
explicitly supplied criteria in various ways), and a response
section 224 with which the item provider user may optionally select
to pay to provide information for inclusion in the answer for the
question. In this example, the question section 222 includes a
question summary ("Desperately seeking plumber"), an indication of
geographic area ("Ballard, Seattle"), tags or other category
information, an indication of an identity of the requester user,
question text details, and an indication of an amount of time
remaining in which the item provider user may opt to provide a paid
response (which may or may not be the same as the expiration for
the question, such as to provide a shorter time as a deadline for
the item provider user in order to provide an option to one or more
additional item provider users to respond to the question if the
initial item provider user(s) decline). The response section 224
provides user interface controls that enable the item provider user
to select whether to provide a paid response to the indicated
question.
[0051] The response section 224 in this example includes a prompt
226a, a user-selectable answer field 226b, and a submit button
226c. In this example, the user is provided with only a limited
ability to provide paid response information to be included in the
answer for the question, and in particular to respond by providing
previously specified profile information for the item provider
user. Such profile information may be default contact and/or other
information as provided by the item provider user, such as to
enable the requester user to contact the item provider user. The
response section 224 in this example additionally informs the item
provider user that they will be charged $0.75 if they choose to
submit a response, such as based on one or more bids as described
with reference to FIG. 2H. The item provider user may opt to have
their response submitted by selecting the appropriate answer
("Yes") in answer field 226b and by activating the submit button
226c. If the item provider user instead selects the "No" option in
the answer field 224 and activates the submit button, or if the
item provider user takes no action (e.g., by not activating the
submit button in the specified time period), the item provider user
will not be charged and their response information will not be
included in the answer for the question in at least some
embodiments. As previously noted, in at least some embodiments a
paid response or other information provided by such an item
provider user for paid inclusion in the answer for a question may
be accompanied by multiple other paid responses from other item
provider users and/or may be accompanied by multiple non-paid
responses from one or more response provider users.
[0052] FIG. 2J illustrates an alternative example GUI screen or
page 230 that may be provided in order to enable an item provider
user to provide a more detailed paid response to a question
supplied by a requester user if the item provider user so elects.
In particular, in this example the displayed information includes a
question section 232 and a response section 234, but the response
section allows the item provider user to specify various details
for inclusion in the answer to the question if the item provider
user so elects. The response section 234 includes a prompt 236a, a
contact information field 236b, an information field 236c, and a
submit button 236d. If the item provider user chooses to provide a
response, he/she may provide his/her contact information in the
contact information field 236b, as well as provide other
information in the information field 236c. Other information may
include other details related to the good or service indicated by
the question (e.g., price quotes, warranty information, additional
charges, schedule information, hours of operation, disclaimers,
etc.). If the item provider user activates the submit button 236d,
the information entered into the contact information field 236b and
the information field 236c will be provided as part of an answer to
the supplied question, and the item provider user will be charged
$0.75. If the item provider user does not activate the submit
button 236d, or if the item provider activates the submit button
236d after the time period specified in the question section 232,
the user will not be charged any fee and any submitted information
will not be provided as part of an answer to the supplied
question.
[0053] Other embodiments may utilize alternative mechanisms for
enabling the provision of paid answers to questions submitted by
requester users. For example, some embodiments may enable item
provider users to store various pre-configured responses and then
select from those responses at the time when the item provider user
responds to the notification. Such pre-configured responses may
include text, audio, images, multimedia, active content, and other
forms of content that specify addresses, advertisements, URLs,
price quotes, etc. Various embodiments may further elect to handle
responses provided after an indicated time period for submitting
responses in various ways, such as to simply discard such responses
and not charge the item provider user, or to provide such responses
as part of an answer that may be viewed by later viewers. Such
embodiments may perform such elections interactively, such as by
informing the item provider user that they have submitted a
response after the indicated time period for responses, but that
they may elect to have their response included for later viewers
for a price (e.g., a price that reflects a discount of the price
that would be ordinarily have been charged to that item provider
user to submit a response).
[0054] In a manner similar to FIG. 2C, FIG. 2K illustrates an
example GUI screen or page 240 that may display a portion of the
answer to a question, such as to the requester user who submitted
the question, but in this example the displayed information
includes a paid response provided by an item provider user. In
particular, in this example the displayed information includes a
question section 242, a summary section 244, and responses 252. The
question section 242 provides details related to the question
submitted by a requester user, with the example question in this
case requesting information related to purchasing digital cameras.
The summary section 244 indicates that three agents have provided a
total of 10 responses so far, and that a single camera merchant has
provided a paid response. The example responses 252 include a paid
response 246 from an item provider user and a portion of a response
provider user response 250. The example paid response 246
illustrates an example of information about a particular camera
merchant, including current availability (e.g., 11 Popular Brand
Model XYZ Digital cameras in stock) and price (e.g., that they are
available for $199.95 each as of a given date). The answer is
otherwise similar to that described in more detail with reference
to FIG. 2C.
[0055] Other embodiments may display multiple responses from item
provider users to a supplied question in various ways. For example,
some embodiments will order such responses based on the amount that
each item provider user bid for the criteria used to initially
match the question, such that responses provided by item provider
users who bid higher amounts of money will be listed prior to, or
more prominently than (e.g., using different font sizes and/or
colors), responses provided by item provider users who bid lower
amounts of money. In some embodiments, only the response provided
by the highest paying item provider user may be displayed by
default, and other responses may optionally be displayed only if
the requester user or other user viewing the answer indicates that
they wish to view such other responses (e.g., by clicking a link or
activating some other user-selectable control that enables the user
to access or otherwise view such other responses).
[0056] In addition, in some embodiments a variety of additional
types of functionality may be provided by the Rapid Answer system
via one or more such GUI screens or pages. For example, in addition
to providing feedback on particular responses that are supplied as
part of the answer for a submitted question, the requester user who
supplied the question may further provide various types of feedback
related to the response provider users who submitted the responses
(e.g., to indicate a response provider user who is particularly
helpful and/or unhelpful, such as based on the provided responses
and/or on clarifications or other interactions with the response
provider user) and/or related to one or more item provider users
who submitted paid responses or to those paid responses (e.g., to
indicate unhelpful or abusive paid responses, such as for use by
the Rapid Answer system in restricting or preventing future such
paid responses from the item provider user). Similarly, response
provider users may also provide various types of feedback regarding
a question for which the response provider user is participating in
providing one or more responses, such as to indicate particular
responses that are supplied by other response provider users for
the submitted question as being helpful (e.g., the best answer)
and/or unhelpful (e.g., lame or abusive), and to provide feedback
regarding tags or other category information submitted by other
response provider users and/or the requester user (e.g., to
indicate the best tag or category, or to indicate unhelpful or
abusive tags or categories). In addition, in some embodiments users
other than a requester user who submitted a question and the
response provider users who provide responses for the question may
be able to provide similar types of feedback for the question, such
as for viewer users and/or item provider users to supply tags and
other categories and/or to provide feedback regarding others' tags,
categories, responses, and participation. Moreover, in some
embodiments users may be able to specify various security and/or
privacy preferences and other information, such as to prevent a
requester user's location information from being displayed unless
it is relevant to the question, or to prevent usernames or other
identity information of users to be provided to others.
[0057] In addition, while examples of various interactions by
various users with the Rapid Answer system have been illustrated
using a GUI provided by the Rapid Answer system, these and other
related types of interactions may be performed in various other
manners in other embodiments. For example, submission of questions,
submission of responses, and other types of interactions may be
programmatically provided to the Rapid Answer system via one or
more APIs provided by the Rapid Answer system in some embodiments,
such as via one or more Web services provided by the Rapid Answer
system. Alternatively, in some embodiments some or all such types
of interactions by various users with the Rapid Answer system may
instead be performed using a messaging interface based on email or
other types of electronic messages, or in other manners (e.g.,
based on an automated voice-based message system, such as via phone
messages). Moreover, in some embodiments multiple modes of
interaction may be used by a particular user with respect to a
particular question, such as to submit a question via email and to
receive responses for the answer using one or more other modes of
communication (e.g., via an automated phone call, via an IM or SMS
message, by interacting with the Rapid Answer system via a GUI or
in a programmatic manner, etc.). In embodiments that utilize IM to
receive questions and responses and to provide answers, the Rapid
Answer system may have an IM identity indicated by a handle or
username (e.g., "RapidAnswers") that users may add to a contact
list (e.g., a buddy list) for purposes of sending and receiving
instant messages to and from the Rapid Answer system that contain
questions, responses, and/or answers.
[0058] FIGS. 2L-2R illustrate examples of various interactions
between participants using an example messaging interface to the
Rapid Answer system that is based on email communications. In
particular, in this example the Rapid Answer system provides one or
more email addresses (or other electronic message addresses) to
which requester users can submit questions, and answers to the
questions can be returned to the requester users at the account
from which a question was submitted and/or to another designated
account. Submitted questions may then be provided to response
provider users and/or item provider users in various ways, and
corresponding responses may be received from those users in various
ways, such as via a GUI as previously described in FIGS. 2A-2K, or
instead based on email messages or another type of messaging
interface.
[0059] In particular, FIG. 2L illustrates an example email message
291 that an example requester user UserABC has sent to submit a
question to the Rapid Answer system, such as to an email address
provided by the Rapid Answer system for receiving such questions
(in this example, "ask@rapid-answer.com"). In this example, the
question is specified as part of the subject line 291d of the
email, such as to request information about Italian restaurants in
Boston, and other information related to the question is not
specified (e.g., tags or other categories, other metadata related
to the question, etc.). FIG. 2M illustrates an alternative example
email message that requester user UserABC has sent to submit a
question to the Rapid Answer system, but in this example the email
message body includes information 291e-291g to specify additional
related information, such as tags or other category information, a
geographic location associated with the question, and information
about a reward offered by UserABC for providing an answer for the
question. In other embodiments, such question-specific rewards
designated by requester users may not be used, such as if each
requester user is instead charged the same amount to submit a
question (e.g., ten cents) and/or if the same number of experience
points is provided as a reward for each such submitted question.
Additional information, such as tag and/or category information,
reward information, etc., is identified in the illustrated email by
preceding the information with a textual indicator to identify the
type of the subsequent information (e.g., by using "tags:" to
indicate the specified tags), but can be specified in other manners
in other embodiments. For example, FIG. 2N illustrates an example
in line 291h in which a character-based indicator is instead used
to identify tag information that is being supplied (in this
example, an at sign "@"). In other embodiments, various types of
information about a question being submitted may instead be
submitted in other manners, such as by including the question text
in the body of the email, submitting the question via multiple
related emails, etc.
[0060] FIG. 2O illustrates several responses supplied back to
UserABC for the supplied question, with the responses each sent in
a separate email message in this example. For example, a first
response email 292 is sent to include a phone number of a
particular restaurant this is supplied by response provider user
UserDEF, with the text of the response included in the subject line
292d in this example. As is shown, in this example the response
email is sent from the Rapid Answer system rather than directly
from the response provider user, with the response information
potentially having been supplied to the Rapid Answer system by
response provider user UserDEF via a GUI of the Rapid Answer
system. Example response email 293 from response provider user
UserGHI includes an opinion response, with summary information
shown in the subject line 293d and with additional information 293e
included in the email message body. Example response email 294
includes a second response from response provider user UserDEF,
which in this example includes a Web site URL. Various other types
of response information may be provided in other manners in other
embodiments, such as by providing multiple responses from a single
response provider user or from all response provider users together
in a single response email message, and by specifying the actual
response information in various other ways.
[0061] In addition, in this example the Rapid Answer system further
automatically includes additional information in the response
emails sent to UserABC, which in this example are tracking
identifiers shown in lines 292e, 293f, and 294e of the response
emails that are unique to the submitted question. In this example,
the tracking identifiers are related but each distinct (e.g., by
including a common base identifier "2341973293" followed by a
suffix identifier specific to each response email), but in other
embodiments may instead be related in other manners, identical for
all of the response emails for a particular question, or unrelated
to each other (e.g., by each being randomly generated and
associated with the corresponding response email). The tracking
identifiers are provided in this example to provide additional
security with respect to some types of actions taken by requester
users. For example, while UserABC was able in this example to
supply a question without including a tracking identifier or other
information for use in verifying the authenticity of the email with
which the question is submitted (e.g., a password or other
identifying information for UserABC), at least some other types of
interactions in this example by UserABC may require additional
verification, such as by including a tracking identifier from an
email supplied for the question to which the interaction is related
(e.g., to provide feedback regarding the responses and/or response
provider users) or from any email (e.g., to provide a command to
the Rapid Answer system related to the account of UserABC that is
not specific to the submitted question). By including a tracking
identifier from a prior email sent to the requester user from the
Rapid Answer system, additional security is provided in that a
malicious user without access to such prior emails cannot send
effective emails to the Rapid Answer system on behalf of
UserABC.
[0062] FIG. 2P illustrates multiple examples of using such tracking
information when the requester user UserABC provides additional
messages, such as for feedback and other commands. For example,
FIG. 2P includes an alternative embodiment of previously discussed
response email 292, which in this example includes information and
user-selectable controls 292f in the body of the email to allow the
requester user to provide feedback related to the response (e.g.,
controls that are links to be displayed in an HTML-based email
viewer). Example email 295 then demonstrates a feedback email that
may be generated and sent to the Rapid Answer system if the
requester user UserABC selects the "Unhelpful" feedback control in
the response email 292, such as in an automatic manner without
further interaction or input by UserABC. In this example, the
generated email is sent to a different email address of the Rapid
Answer system (e.g., "feedback@rapid-answer.com"), and the actual
feedback and a tracking identifier that is related to (e.g., based
on) the tracking identifier from the response email 292 are
included in the subject line of the feedback email. In other
embodiments, the feedback email may contain other types of
information and/or be specified in another manner (e.g., the
tracking identifier included in the feedback email may instead be
identical to the tracking identifier in the response email 292, or
may be unrelated, such as if the included tracking identifier was
previously generated by the Rapid Answer system and associated with
the "Unhelpful" control in the response email 292 that was sent to
the requester user).
[0063] Example feedback email 296 provides an alternative example
of a feedback email from requester user UserABC related to prior
response email 294, and in particular illustrates an example of a
feedback email that is generated by UserABC without use of any
special feedback-related controls provided to UserABC. Instead, in
this example UserABC provides feedback related to the response
email 294 by using email reply capabilities, with the response
email 294 included in the reply feedback email in typical fashion
(including the tracking identifier that was present in response
email 294), with the reply email being returned to the sender of
the response email 294 (which in this example was indicated to be
the same "ask@rapid-answer.com" email address, although in other
embodiments a distinct response email address could be used for
each of some or all of the response emails, such as
"response@rapid-answer.com"), and with the "Unhelpful" feedback
being manually input by UserABC in line 296e of the body of the
feedback email. In other embodiments, tracking identifiers and/or
other tracking functionality may be used in other manners, and
while the tracking identifiers are labeled in this example, in
other embodiments the tracking identifiers may not be labeled
and/or may be otherwise obfuscated in order to prevent
identification of the information by malicious users. Such
obfuscation may be accomplished in various ways, such as by being
placed into email message headers that are typically not displayed
by email clients, by being located in non-displayable portions of a
rich-text message body (e.g., as a comment in an HTML-formatted
message body), by being embedded or otherwise encoded in binary
message content (e.g., as a comment field or watermark in binary
image data), etc.
[0064] FIG. 2Q illustrates an example of a command email that is
supplied by UserABC to the Rapid Answer system in such a manner as
to use a tracking identifier from an email previously sent to
UserABC by the Rapid Answer system, but with the prior email being
unrelated to the current command. In particular, in this example
each question submission by UserABC is paid for by UserABC based on
previously purchased question credits or points, and UserABC
desires to pre-purchase credits for use in submitting ten
additional questions. Accordingly, UserABC in this example selects
any email that was previously sent to UserABC by the Rapid Answer
system (or in other embodiments any such previously sent email that
meets specified criteria, such as within a certain amount of time
and/or of a certain type), and generates a reply email to the Rapid
Answer system that includes a desired command (e.g., one of a
predefined set of commands that were previously provided to
UserABC, such as when UserABC initially registered with the Rapid
Answer system and/or configured use of the messaging-based
interface). In this example, UserABC generates a command email
message 297 by replying to prior response email 294, and includes
the command "Buy 10" in line 297e of the body of the reply mail to
indicate that ten additional question credits are to be
pre-purchased (e.g., using previously specified payment information
from UserABC's account). When the Rapid Answer system receives the
command email, the system verifies that the command email includes
a tracking identifier from an email that the Rapid Answer system
previously provided to UserABC, and may further perform additional
checking to determine whether to authorize the indicated action
(e.g., by reviewing previously specified preferences or other
configuration information for UserABC, by reviewing a current
status of UserABC's account and whether any money is owed or other
problems exist, etc.). In this example, the Rapid Answer system
determines to grant the command, but only if UserABC supplies
additional confirmation to ensure that the received command email
was actually from UserABC (e.g., for some or all types of command
messages). Accordingly, the Rapid Answer system generates and sends
confirmation request email 298 that requests in subject line 298d
that UserABC reply to confirm the command. In the illustrated
example, the confirmation request email 298 includes a new tracking
identifier in line 298e that is related to but distinct from the
tracking identifier used with UserABC's command email 297 (e.g., by
sharing the first six digits, but with the subsequent four digits
being randomly generated). In this example, after UserABC receives
the confirmation request email, UserABC replies with confirmation
email 299 that includes the command "Confirm" in line 299e of the
email message body. Upon receipt of the confirmation email (and
optionally upon verification that the reply email includes the
tracking identifier from the confirmation request email), the Rapid
Answer system performs the command by obtaining payment from
UserABC for the ten additional question credits and by associating
those prepaid credits with UserABC's account. It will be
appreciated that a variety of other types of commands can be
supplied, including to reflect any action that a requester user
could take by instead interacting with a GUI and/or programmatic
interface of the Rapid Answer system, and that various types of
command information may instead be specified in other manners in
other embodiments (e.g., using XML or other types of data
formatting). Additional details regarding other examples of
commands are described below. In addition, while examples of use of
a messaging-based interface have been shown for only requester
users, it will be appreciated that in at least some embodiments any
user (including response provider users, item provider users and
viewer users) could use such a messaging-based interface with
appropriate types of messages.
[0065] FIG. 2R illustrates two additional example types of messages
that may be used with the messaging-based interface, although a
variety of other types of messages may be used in other
embodiments. In this example, message 281 represents a
clarification message to requester user UserABC to reflect a
clarification request from a potential or actual response provider
user regarding the question previously submitted by UserABC--in
particular, in this example the clarification question is included
in the subject line 281d, but could instead be specified in other
manners. While not illustrated, UserABC could then provide
clarification information by replying to the clarification request
email in a manner to that previously discussed for other types of
reply emails. In addition, example email message 282 represents a
paid response to the question previously submitted by UserABC. More
specifically, in the illustrated example, a representative of item
provider Restaurant RRR has elected to provide a response to
UserABC's question (e.g., after receiving and reviewing the
question) in exchange for payment from Restaurant RRR. Accordingly,
the subject line 282d in this example includes information
specified by the Restaurant RRR representative for use in this
response. While the response is indicated in this example as being
a paid response, in other embodiments such paid responses or other
paid information from item provider users may not be explicitly
identified as being distinct from responses from response provider
users.
[0066] Thus, the Rapid Answer system may perform various types of
interactions with various types of users. Additional details
related to one example system for interacting with users to supply
tasks to be done and to receive corresponding results are included
in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/990,949, filed Nov. 16, 2004
and entitled "Providing An Electronic Marketplace To Facilitate
Human Performance Of Programmatically Submitted Tasks," which is
hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
[0067] As previously noted, a response provider user may receive
payment or other compensation from the Rapid Answer system at
various times, such as for a response for a particular question
that has a monetary reward and/or as part of sharing a portion of
an ongoing revenue stream associated with one or more answers to
which the response provider user contributed. In some embodiments,
such monetary rewards are associated with an account of the
response provider user at the Rapid Answer system, and the response
provider user may access the account (e.g., at designated times or
in designated situations, such as once the accumulated earnings
have reached a minimum threshold or no more often than a designated
access frequency, or instead at any time) in order to obtain access
their accumulated earnings (e.g., to be used as part of an
ecommerce transaction, to be obtained as cash, etc.). In other
embodiments, earnings may be automatically provided to response
provider users in other manners (e.g., periodically, such as
monthly), such as by a payment component that is part of the Rapid
Answer system or instead based on interactions between the Rapid
Answer system and one or more third-party payment systems. In
addition, other types of users may similarly receive and/or make
payments in some embodiments and situations, such as by interacting
with such a payment component of the Rapid Answer system or instead
based on interactions with one or more third-party payment systems.
Additional details related to example systems for making payments
and for tracking related information for users are included in U.S.
patent application Ser. No. 10/894,350, filed Jul. 19, 2004 and
entitled "Performing Automatically Authorized Programmatic
Transactions," and in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/200,880,
filed Aug. 9, 2005 and entitled "Performing Providing Payments
Automatically In Accordance With Predefined Instructions," each of
which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
[0068] In some embodiments, rewards may be allocated to response
provider users who provide responses to questions of other
requester users, and FIGS. 3A-3C illustrate examples of allocations
of such rewards. In particular, FIG. 3A shows an example of a
reward allocation for responses to a question to which 100
experience points have been allocated for the question's answer. In
the table, there are columns for responses 301, response provider
user 1 303, response provider user 2 305, response provider user 3
307, response provider user 4 309, response provider user 5 311,
and total points 313. Rows 315a-e each represent an individual
unique response. Although the number of responses equals the number
of response provider users in this example, the numbers are
exemplary, and in other situations there may be differing numbers
of responses and response provider users.
[0069] Since there were 5 unique responses and 100 points for the
question in this example, each unique response is allocated an
equal number of 20 points. Once the points for each response are
determined, the points may be allocated to response provider users
by dividing the number of points by the number of response provider
users that gave the response. Thus, for Link A 315a, since the
points for Link A is 20 points and 4 response provider users gave
the response, each response provider user gets 5 points (20
points/4 response provider users). The process is repeated for all
remaining responses, and the results are shown in rows 315b-e. In
addition, some types of responses may be considered to be
inherently unique, such as if all opinions are considered unique.
Thus, if multiple response provider users provide an opinion, each
opinion may count as a separate response. In addition, some types
of responses (e.g., phone numbers) may be unique if the system will
not accept an additional response that is a duplicate. Totals 317
for the response provider users may be calculated by adding the
number of points within each response provider user's column (i.e.,
for all the responses supplied by the response provider user).
Thus, response provider user 1 303 receives a total of 15
experience points (5 for Link A and 10 for Link B) for his/her
responses to this question. These assessed experience points that
are newly allocated to a response provider user may then be
combined with any prior experience points or other related
information for a user in order to determine a current assessed
experience score, such as by adding the newly allocated experience
points or otherwise combining the new and existing experience
points (e.g., in a weighted manner, such as to give greater weight
to recent experience points or to historical experience
points).
[0070] In other embodiments, other algorithms may be employed to
allocate experience points to responses and/or to response provider
users. In some embodiments, various factors other than uniqueness
of responses may be used to allocate points to responses, including
the quality of responses (e.g., as measured by feedback from a
requester user who supplied the corresponding question and/or by
feedback from other response provider users who provided responses
for the question) and/or timeliness of the received responses
(e.g., to provide more points for rapidly provided responses and/or
for responses provided by an indicated deadline). In addition,
rather than allocating a fixed number of experience points for an
answer, in some embodiments each response and/or response provider
user may be allocated a variable number of experience points based
on a metric such as quality and/or timeliness, each of which may be
measured in various ways in various embodiments. For example,
quality may be measured based on feedback received from one or more
users and/or in an automatically assessed manner, such as based on
a comparison to other responses (such as responses known or
believed to be of particular levels of quality) and/or other
factors such as a completeness or other objectively measurable
aspect of the response, and timeliness may similarly be measured
based on feedback received from one or more users and/or in an
automatically assessed manner. As one example, each response may be
allocated 20 experience points if given the highest rating, 10
experience points if given a good rating, 5 experience points if
given an acceptable rating or if not explicitly rated, -10
experience points if given a lame or otherwise unhelpful rating,
and -20 experience points if given an abusive rating. As another
example, a response provider user who first provided a response may
be favored and given more points (e.g., 1/2 of the points for the
response), such as for embodiments that allow response provider
users to see responses from other response provider users. In some
embodiments, if a question is associated with multiple categories,
then the experience points given may be divided by the number of
categories to award experience points for each category. Thus, for
a two-category question, the response provider user 1 would receive
7.5 points for each category. In other embodiments, the experience
points for each response are not divided for each category, and the
same number of experience points for the response are awarded for
each category. In some embodiments, points are rounded to the
nearest whole point; while in others, fractional experience points
may be awarded.
[0071] FIG. 3B shows an example of an experience point reward
allocation similar to that shown in FIG. 3A, but with the
allocation being modified to reflect requester user feedback
regarding a lame answer response. The question is the same
100-point question from FIG. 3A, but in this example the requester
user who asked the question has identified the Link A response as
being lame. Similar to the table in FIG. 3A, there are columns for
responses 331, response provider user 1 333, response provider user
2 335, response provider user 3 337, response provider user 4 339,
response provider user 5 341, and total points 343. The rows 335a-e
each similarly represent responses, and row 337 represents the
total number of points for the response provider user. Since the
Link A response was marked lame, it is not identified as a response
to be used in the answer, and points are reallocated among the four
responses in the answer in a manner similar to that previously
described with respect to FIG. 3A. Thus, each remaining response is
now worth 25 points (100 points/4 responses), and points are split
among the response provider users who gave the same response. In
addition, the response provider users who supplied the lame
response also have a predetermined number of experience points
(e.g., 10 points) taken away as a penalty in this example.
[0072] FIG. 3C shows an example of an experience point reward
allocation similar to that shown in FIG. 3A, but with the
allocation being modified to reflect requester user feedback
regarding an abusive answer response. The question is the same
100-point question from FIG. 3A, but in this example the requester
user who asked the question has identified the Link C response as
being abusive. Similar to the table in FIG. 3A, there are columns
for responses 351, response provider user 1 353, response provider
user 2 355, response provider user 3 357, response provider user 4
359, response provider user 5 361, and total points 363. The rows
355a-e similarly each represent responses, and row 357 represents
the total number of points for the response provider user. As a
result of Link C being marked as abusive, both the Link C response
and any other response provided by response provider users who
supplied Link C as a response are removed from the answer, and the
experience points are reallocated among the remaining answers in a
manner similar to that previously described with respect to FIG.
3A. Since there are now only 3 valid responses (since Link C is
removed as abusive and the opinion is removed because response
provider user 3 also supplied the abusive response), each response
is worth 33 points, and rows 355a-c reflect the number of
experience points allocated for each response provider user for
each response. In addition to not earning any points for the
question, the response provider user(s) who provided the abusive
response may also have a predetermined number of points taken away
as a penalty; in this example, the predetermined number of points
is 50 points. Row 357 shows the total number of points for each of
the response provider users after the reallocation.
[0073] In other embodiments, penalties and award allocation may be
performed in different manners and the illustrated examples are
merely exemplary. Thus, in some embodiments, if a response is
marked as abusive, only the abusive answer may be removed and
result in a penalty, and the response provider user's other
responses may still result in experience points. In some
embodiments, the requester user may identify multiple responses as
lame and/or abusive. In some embodiments, the predetermined number
of experience points taken away as a penalty may escalate based on
the number of lame or abusive responses received from a user within
a period of time, such as a rolling time period or a fixed time
period. In some embodiments, various information may further be
displayed such as the percentage of responses marked as lame and/or
abusive. In some embodiments, response provider users may also
identify responses of other response provider users as lame or
abusive, and in some embodiments item provider users' responses may
also be marked as lame and/or abusive. Furthermore, in some
embodiments, response provider users may be penalized in manners
other than a reduction in experience points, such as by temporarily
or permanently banning such users from receiving questions,
providing answers, or undertaking other actions.
[0074] In addition, in some embodiments, experience points may be
utilized to incentivize or otherwise control the activity of item
provider users. For example, item provider users may be awarded
experience points based on positive feedback obtained from
requester users and/or other users of the Rapid Answer system. Such
feedback may be based on the usefulness of responses (e.g.,
accuracy and/or responsiveness of information provided) and/or
evaluations of goods and/or services provided by an item provider
user (e.g., quality of provided service, promptness of delivery of
provided goods, value of provided goods, etc.). In addition, item
provider users may be incentivized to obtain successively higher
levels of expertise (e.g., as measured by an accumulation of
experience points) by providing additional benefits to item
provider users with advanced expertise levels. Such benefits may
include favorable payment terms (e.g., discounts on the amount of
money an item provider pays to provide a response, longer periods
of time for account payment, etc.), increased access to questions
that are more likely to be valuable to item provider users (e.g.,
requests for information for expensive goods and/or services), etc.
In addition, penalties may be utilized to provide disincentives for
item provider users to undertake undesirable activities. Such
undesirable activities may include, for example, submitting
responses that are not unhelpful or otherwise irrelevant (e.g.,
advertisements or solicitations for goods and/or services not
related to those indicated by the question), providing
nonconforming goods and/or services (e.g., defective goods, poor
quality service, slow delivery, failure to honor warranties, etc.),
etc. Such penalties may be based on a reduction of accumulated
experience points for an item provider user, such that a penalized
item provider user may lose an enhanced status that was based on
accumulation of experience points. In addition, other penalty
mechanisms may be used, such as temporary or permanent prohibitions
of particular actions of a penalized item provider user (e.g., bans
on providing any responses or providing responses to certain
categories of questions, etc).
[0075] FIGS. 4A-4B illustrate examples of determining portions of
an ongoing revenue stream for an answer to be shared with users who
provide responses that are part of the answer. In particular, FIG.
4A shows one embodiment of determining the revenue stream share
portions for a question whose answer has been determined, with the
answer in this example having a single associated category (not
shown). The table in FIG. 4A has columns 401, 403, 405, 407, and
409 representing the five response provider users who provided a
response, and column 411 representing a total. The number of
response provider users is only exemplary, and more or fewer
response provider users may have answered any individual question.
In order to determine the percentage of the revenue share between
the response provider users, the relative ranking of the response
provider users for the category associated with the answer to the
question may be determined based on the experience points earned
for the category. Row 413 illustrates the current experience score
of each user in the category associated with the answer
(represented here by the raw number of total experience points for
the user in the category), and the relative ranking for the users
based on those experience points is shown in row 415 (in this
example, the response provider user with the highest number of
experience points in the category receives the highest relative
ranking of 5, since there are five response provider users, while
the response provider user with the lowest ranking receives the
relative rank of 1). The percentage of the revenue share portion is
then determined in this example for each response provider user in
a manner weighted by the relative ranking of the user--in
particular, the total of the relative rankings in this example is
15 (the sum of 1+2+3+4+5), and the percentage is determined by
dividing the relative ranking by the total ranking. The result is
shown in row 417 for each of the response provider users.
[0076] In other embodiments, different allocation algorithms may be
utilized. For example, response provider users who provided a
response marked lame or abusive may not receive a revenue share for
the answer in some embodiments. In some embodiments, response
provider users who only provided a lame response may instead have
their revenue share percentage adjusted downward, while the
response provider user who provided the best response may receive
the portion of the revenue taken away from the response provider
user that provided the lame response. If multiple categories were
associated with the answer, the revenue stream determination may
first determine the amount of revenue for each category (e.g., by
dividing the total revenue stream portion by the number of
categories), and then perform a relative ranking based on each
category.
[0077] FIG. 4B shows an example of a revenue stream share
determination similar to that shown in FIG. 4A, but with the
determination occurring at a later time during an extended revenue
share time period of the answer, such that users who lack an
enhanced incentive level status are no longer receiving a portion
of the revenue stream share during the extended period. The
question is the same question as shown in FIG. 4A. The table in
FIG. 4B, similar to FIG. 4A, has columns 421, 423, 425, 427, 429,
431 representing the five response provider users that provided a
response and a total, respectively. However, at this later point in
time the number of experience points of the response provider users
may have changed, such as based on the response provider users
having answered additional questions and received additional
experience points. Once again, the users are relatively ranked for
each category based on the number of experience points for this
category and the percents calculated, but response provider user 1
has now overtaken response provider user 3 in the relative
rankings. Row 433 shows the current experience scores for the
response provider users based on cumulative experience points, and
row 435 shows the current relative ranking of the response provider
users. However, if the response provider user does not have an
enhanced status, then the percent actually earned becomes zero.
Therefore, only one response provider user receives a percentage
payout for this category, as shown in the percentage of revenue
payout row 437, and the remaining revenue is in this example
retained by the Rapid Answer system.
[0078] Preferred or other enhanced status may also change over
time, resulting in the gain or loss of the additional time for
revenue sharing. In some embodiments, once the revenue share is
lost, it may be lost forever and subsequently obtaining an enhanced
status may not restore it. In other embodiments, if a response
provider user achieves an enhanced status, he/she is eligible for
revenue sharing during an extended period even for responses
previously provided when the response provider user did not have
the enhanced status and even for answers that entered the extended
period when the response provider user did not have the enhanced
status. However, after some period of time, even users with
enhanced status may not receive ongoing payments.
[0079] FIG. 5 is a block diagram illustrating a rapid answer
computing system 500 suitable for executing an embodiment of a
described Rapid Answer system, as well as various requester user
computing systems, response provider user computing systems, and
other computing systems for performing various interactions with
the Rapid Answer system. In the illustrated embodiment, the rapid
answer computing system 500 includes a CPU 505, various I/O devices
510, storage 540, and memory 520. The various I/O devices 510 may
include a display 511, a network interface 512, a computer-readable
media drive 513, and other I/O devices 515.
[0080] In the illustrated embodiment, a Rapid Answer system 530 and
a revenue generation system 525 are executing in the memory 520 of
the rapid answer computing system 500. The Rapid Answer system 530
interacts with other computing systems via the network 580 (e.g.,
via the Internet and/or the World Wide Web) in order to perform at
least some of the described techniques. The Rapid Answer system 530
includes a Requester User Interaction Manager component 531, a
Response Provider User Interaction Manager component 532, an Item
Provider User Interaction Manager component 533, an Answer Reward
Allocation Manager component 534, an Answer Revenue Stream Share
Determination Manager component 535, an Answer Categorization
Manager component 536, an Answer Experience Level Incentive Manager
component 537, a payment component 538, and optional other
components 539. In other embodiments, the components may instead be
organized in other manners. The Answer Reward Allocation Manager
component 534, the Answer Revenue Stream Share Determination
Manager component 535, the Answer Categorization Manager component
536, the Answer Experience Level Incentive Manager component 537
may be used internally and various security measures may prevent
external access to these components. In addition, in the
illustrated embodiment a variety of data structures (e.g.,
databases) 541, 542, 543, 544, 545 are present in the storage 540
for use by the Rapid Answer system 530 and the revenue generation
system 525, although in other embodiments some or all such
databases may instead be located elsewhere and/or organized in
other manners.
[0081] The revenue generation system 525 interacts with multiple
advertisers computer systems to generate revenue and store details
about the revenue generated. Revenue details may be stored in the
revenue database 546 data structure. In those embodiments that
determine or estimate the revenue generated for each question, the
revenue generation system may also keep track of the revenue
generated for the question or the factors used in estimating the
revenue, respectively. The revenue generation system may also
interact with the item provider computer systems. In some
embodiments, the revenue generation system may also cache or stores
advertisements to place onto graphical user interfaces for the
viewer user and potentially other types of users.
[0082] Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the
illustrated computing systems are merely illustrative and are not
intended to limit the scope of the present invention. The rapid
answer computing system 500 may be connected to other devices that
are not illustrated, including through one or more networks such as
the Internet, the Web, or LAN ("Local Area Network"). More
generally, the rapid answer computing system, requester user
computing systems, response provider user computing systems, and
other computing systems may comprise any combination of hardware
and software that can interact in the manners described, including
computers, network devices, internet appliances, PDAs ("Personal
Digital Assistants"), wireless phones, pagers, electronic
organizers, television-based systems and other various consumer
products that include inter-communication capabilities. In
addition, the functionality provided by the Rapid Answer system
components illustrated in FIG. 5 may in some embodiments be
combined in fewer components or distributed in additional
components. Similarly, in some embodiments the functionalities of
some of the illustrated components may not be provided and/or other
additional functionality may be available.
[0083] Those skilled in the art will also appreciate that, while
various items are illustrated as being stored in memory or on
storage while being used, these items or portions of them can be
transferred between memory and other storage devices for purposes
of memory management and data integrity. Alternatively, in other
embodiments some or all of the software modules and/or components
may execute in memory on another device and communicate with the
illustrated computing device via inter-computer communication. Some
or all of the rapid answer system components or data structures may
also be stored (e.g., as instructions or structured data) on a
computer-readable medium, such as a hard disk, a memory, a network,
or a portable article to be read by an appropriate drive. The
access manager components and data structures can also be
transmitted as generated data signals (e.g., as part of a carrier
wave) on a variety of computer-readable transmission mediums,
including wireless-based and wired/cable-based mediums.
Accordingly, the present invention may be practiced with other
computer system configurations.
[0084] FIG. 6 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of a
Requester User Interaction Manager routine 600. The routine may,
for example, be provided by execution of the Requester User
Interaction Manager component 531 of FIG. 5 such as to receive
requests for questions from requester users and after responses are
received, display the results. In some embodiments, the routine
also allows the user to provide feedback about the responses and
reply to requests for clarification.
[0085] At step 605, the routine receives a question, one or more
tags and optionally a reward and additional information as
appropriate from a requester user. Additional information may
include information that requester users regularly fail to provide
such as the requester user's location or operating system for a
computer question. The additional information may also include a
time in which the question should be answered and a summary of the
question. After step 605, during step 610, a reward is determined
for each question. If the user did not specify the reward for the
question in points (e.g., instead specified in units of currency),
then the Rapid Answer system may convert the reward into a
corresponding number of points for later use by the Answer Reward
Allocation Manager routine 800. Points may be obtained by requester
users in various ways, including by purchasing them from the Rapid
Answer system and/or by grant from the Rapid Answer system (e.g.,
if every requester user receives an initial allotment of points
and/or receives additional points on a periodic basis), and in some
embodiments a simple exchange rate may be utilized between
government currency and points (e.g., 100 points=$1.00).
[0086] At step 615, the requester user's account is updated to
reflect the reward. For example, if the reward was money, the
requester user may be charged the amount during step 615 and if the
reward was a number of points, then the points to be used to make
request may be deducted. The routine may then wait for the
responses to the question at step 620. In some embodiments, since
there are a lot of response provider users, responses may be
provided within minutes. However, if the question is about local
services and it is the middle of the night locally, the response
may take longer. In some embodiments, while waiting for a response,
the requester user may be asked for clarification of a question.
For example, if the requester user fails to provide the requester
user's location, then a clarification may involve asking the
requester user for the requester user's location. After waiting for
the response in 620, at step 625, the responses are provided to the
requester user. In some embodiments, such responses may be provided
to the requester user via one or more electronic messages (e.g.,
with each response sent in a separate email message), and the Rapid
Answer system may further include a tracking identifier in some or
all some electronic messages (e.g., a unique tracking identifier
for each electronic message, such as may be randomly generated and
associated with the requester user). After providing the responses,
the requester user may provide feedback that is received by the
routine at step 630. The feedback may take the form of indicating
that one or more of the responses is lame, abusive, or excellent.
In some embodiments, the feedback may be provided to the Answer
Reward Allocation Manager routine 800 so that the point allocation
can be adjusted appropriately. In step 635, other operations may be
optionally performed. For example, if the question was not answered
or all responses were unhelpful or abusive, the update to requester
user's account regarding the reward may be rolled back. At step
640, the routine determines whether or not to continue. If so, then
the routine continues to step 605. If not, the routine ends at step
645.
[0087] FIG. 7 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of a
Response Provider User Interaction Manager routine 700. The routine
may, for example, be provided by execution of the Response Provider
User Interaction Manager component 532 of FIG. 5 such as to allow
response provider users to view open questions and receive
responses as potential answers to the open questions. This routine
may in some embodiments operate in parallel with the Item Provider
User Interaction Manager routine 1200 described with reference to
FIG. 12, such that response provider users are providing responses
to a question at the same time that item provider users are
providing paid responses to the question. The routine starts at
step 705 where the routine receives a request from response
provider users for information about open questions. After
receiving the information, the routine determines if the request
was a request to identify appropriate questions at step 710. If the
request was to identify available questions that match appropriate
questions, then at step 715 the routine determines questions that
match user requests and continues at step 730. If not, the routine
continues at step 720 and identifies areas of expertise of interest
for the response provider user. For response provider users that
have previously answered a lot of questions, the areas may be
identified based on the number of experience points earned for each
category. If the response provider user is relatively new, the area
of expertise may be determined in some embodiments based on
categories the response provider user self-selected upon
registration with the Rapid Answer system. After determining the
areas of expertise, the routine identifies questions that match the
response provider user's area of expertise at step 725. After
identifying the open questions, the routine proceeds to step
730.
[0088] In step 730, the routine provides indications of the
identified questions to the response provider user and receives a
response to the indicated question and optionally one or more
categories. In some embodiments, the response from the response
provider user may include multiple items (e.g., multiple URLs that
are the source of the information, a URL and a phone number). After
receiving the response, the response is stored in step 735 such as
storing the response in the answer database 545 data structure. In
step 740, the routine determines if the question is complete. A
question may be complete when the time period for the response has
expired, after a predetermined number of responses have been
received, after a predetermined number of response provider users
have given responses to the question, or after the requester user
who submitted the question has indicated that the question is
complete. If the question is complete, then the routine at step 745
indicates that the question is complete and proceeds to step 750.
The indication that the question is complete may also be provided
to other components, such as the Answer Reward Allocation Manager
534 of FIG. 5 for purposes of determining reward allocation for the
completed question. If the question is determined to not be
complete, the routine proceeds to step 750.
[0089] During step 750, the routine optionally performs additional
processing. In some embodiments, the optional additional processing
may include adding additional area of expertise to the response
provider user's expertise. Additionally, the routine may in some
embodiments at step 750 receive feedback from the response provider
users such as voting on the best response, best category and
suggesting tags. The routine may also perform the additional
processing of determining if any additional rewards such as the
ones specified by the requester user are to be awarded and if so,
providing the appropriate indications. After the optional
additional processing, at step 755, the routine determines whether
or not to continue. If so, then the routine continues to step 705.
If not, the routine ends at step 760.
[0090] FIG. 12 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Item Provider User Interaction Manager routine. The routine may be
provided, for example, by execution of the Item Provider User
Interaction Manager component 533 of FIG. 5. The illustrated
routine handles item provider user requests such as specifications
of question matching criteria and/or contact information. In
addition, the routine responds to notifications to present
questions to item provider users by providing questions to, and
receiving responses from, item provider users. In some embodiments,
the routine may run in parallel to other routines, such as the
Response Provider User Interaction Manager routine of FIG. 7.
[0091] The Item Provider User Interaction Management routine 1200
begins in step 1205 and receives an item provider user request or a
notification to present a question to an item provider user for an
optional response. In some embodiments, an item provider user
request may be received, for example, from a user interface
component that displays a GUI screen such as the one described with
reference to FIG. 2H. In some embodiments, a notification to
present a question to an item provider user may be received from,
for example, the Requester User Interaction component 531 of FIG. 5
upon the receipt of a question provided by a requester user. In
step 1210, the routine determines whether an item provider user
request or a notification was received. If it is determined that an
item provider user request was received, the routine proceeds to
step 1215. Item provider user requests may be received by way of a
user interface such as the one described with reference to FIG. 2H.
In step 1215, the routine determines whether the item provider user
request is to specify question matching criteria. If so, the
routine proceeds to step 1220, and obtains and stores question
matching criteria (such as those described with reference to FIG.
2H) for the item provider that made the request. If it is instead
determined in step 1215 that the item provider user request does
not specify question matching criteria, or after step 1220, the
routine proceeds to step 1225 and determines whether the item
provider user request is to specify contact information for the
item provider user. If so, the routine proceeds to step 1230 and
obtains and stores contact information for the item provider user.
If it is instead determined in step 1225 that the item provider
user request is not to specify contact information, or after step
1230, the routine proceeds to step 1235 and determines whether some
other action is indicated by the item provider user request. If so,
the routine proceeds to step 1240 and performs the other indicated
action as appropriate. Other actions may include item provider user
account operations, such as setting up or modifying payment
mechanisms, modifying one or more pre-configured responses,
etc.
[0092] If it is instead determined in step 1210 that a notification
has been received, the routine proceeds to step 1250 and presents
the question and an option to respond to the indicated item
provider user of step 1205. In step 1255, the routine waits to
receive a timeout or to receive an indication from the item
provider user. As described in more detail elsewhere, the item
provider user may have a pre-determined period of time in which to
accept or reject the option to provide a response to the question.
During the pre-determined time period, the item provider user may
explicitly indicate that they have either accepted or rejected
(e.g., by activating the appropriate user interface controls, such
as those described with reference to FIGS. 2I and 2J).
Alternatively, if the item provider user does not respond within
the pre-determined time period, of if they respond after the
pre-determined time period, it will typically be treated as a
rejection of the option. In step 1260, the routine determines
whether a timeout or an indication of option rejection has been
received. If neither a timeout nor an option rejection has been
received, the routine proceeds to step 1265 and provides a response
from the item provider user for the question answer. The response
provided by the item provider user may be incorporated with or
otherwise displayed as part of the answer provided to the requester
user, as shown, for example in FIG. 2K. In step 1270, the routine
obtains payment from the item provider user. Payment may be
obtained by various techniques, including electronic funds
transfers between bank accounts (e.g., debits from an item provider
account), credit card payment processing, etc. In some embodiments,
the actual payment for an individual response may be aggregated in
an account, which may be billed to the item provider user on a
periodic (e.g., monthly) or other (e.g., when the account value
reaches or exceeds a pre-determined threshold amount). Other
embodiments may elect to delay obtaining payment until a condition
is met, such as when the requester user is actually provided the
response (e.g., by serving a Web page that displays the answer
containing the response), or when the requester user actually
selects (e.g., clicks a URL provided by the item provider user) or
otherwise indicates that they are viewing or otherwise showing
interest in the provided response and/or answer that includes
response.
[0093] If it is instead determined in step 1235 that the request
does not indicate some other action, or if it is instead determined
in step 1260 that a timeout or an option rejection has been
received, or after steps 1265 and 1240, the routine proceeds to
step 1295 and determines whether to continue. If so, the routine
proceeds to step 1205 and continues processing. If not, the routine
proceeds to step 1299 and ends.
[0094] FIG. 8 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Reward Allocation Manager routine 800. The routine may, for
example, be provided by execution of the Answer Reward Allocation
Manager component 534 of FIG. 5 such as to determine the award
allocation and may revise the allocation after feedback from the
requester user that asked the question. The routine begins at step
805 where the routine receives an indication of requester user
feedback for a completed answer or an indication of an answer for a
question and an answer reward. In step 810, the routine determines
if the indication was feedback from the requester user. If so, the
routine proceeds to step 850. If not, the routine proceeds to step
815 where the total number of experience points for the question is
determined. If the requester user used points to ask a question,
then in some embodiments those points will be used as the total
number of experience points for the question. If not, the number of
experience points for the question may in some embodiments be a
predetermined number of points for each dollar of a monetary reward
or a predetermined number of points for each request.
[0095] After determining the total number of experience points for
the question, the routine identifies unique responses and the
number of response provider users that provided a response used in
the answer in step 820. After identifying unique responses and the
number of response provider users, the routine proceeds to step 825
and determines the one or more categories associated with the
answer. The determination of categories is described in more detail
with reference to the Answer Categorization Manager Routine 1000 of
FIG. 10. After determining the categories, the number of points for
each category is determined in step 830. In some embodiments, the
number of points per category may be determined by dividing the
total number of points by the number of categories, such as
described in more reference to FIGS. 3A-3C.
[0096] During step 835, the routine allocates for each category the
points for the category between the response provider users to
reflect their contribution to the unique responses. The routine
continues to step 840. In step 840, the routine optionally performs
additional processing such as in some embodiments updating the area
of expertise of the response provider user. In some embodiments,
the additional processing may also provide indications of bonuses
awarded to the response provider user (e.g., to the response
provider user account DB 542 for use by other components, such as
the Answer Experience Level Incentive Manager 537 or the payment
component 538 of FIG. 5). After optionally performing the
additional processing, at step 895, the routine determines whether
or not to continue. If so, then the routine continues to step 805.
If not, the routine ends at step 899.
[0097] If in step 810 the routine determines that the request was
for feedback from a requester user, then the routine proceeds to
step 850 where the routine determines if one or more responses were
marked unhelpful. If so, then the routine proceeds to step 855
where the unhelpful response(s) are removed from the reward
allocation and the points reallocated appropriately. An
illustration of an embodiment of how to reallocate points for an
unhelpful response is demonstrated in FIG. 3B. After adjusting the
point allocation appropriately or if no responses were marked
unhelpful, the routine continues to step 860 where the routine
determines if any of the responses were marked as abusive. If so,
in step 865, the appropriate penalty for the response(s) marked as
abusive is awarded and points are reallocated. The appropriate
penalty may involve removing the responses marked as abusive and
not awarding any points for other responses from response provider
users that provided the abusive response. An illustration of an
example embodiment of how to reallocate points for an abusive
response is demonstrated in FIG. 3C. After removing the abusive
response and reallocating points or if there were no responses
marked as abusive, the routine continues to step 870. In step 870,
the routine determines if other feedback has been received.
Additional feedback may include best response, best response
provider user, and other positive feedback. If a response is
elected to be the best answer, a number of bonus points may be
awarded in some embodiments to the response provider user that
provided the response. For example, best answer information may be
leveraged to determine the order to display previously answered
questions to viewer users within a category.
[0098] FIG. 9 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Revenue Stream Share Determination Manager routine 900. The
routine may, for example, be provided by execution of the Answer
Revenue Stream Share Determination Manager component 535 of FIG. 5,
such as to determine the revenue stream share that each eligible
response provider user receives for eligible answers. The revenue
stream itself may be generated by, for example, the revenue
generation system 525 of FIG. 5. The routine starts at step 905
where the routine receives indications of revenue-eligible answers
and the revenue stream to be shared. During step 905, the routine
also determines the revenue stream for each question. In some
embodiments, the revenue stream may be the actual or an estimate of
the revenue generated for the answer; however, in other
embodiments, the revenue stream per answer may also be determined
by dividing a predetermined percentage of the revenue stream by the
number of revenue-eligible answers. In order to estimate the
revenue generated for each question, many factors including the
number of times the answer has been viewed, the number of unique
users that viewed the answer, the popularity of the category may be
utilized. All answers may not be revenue-eligible since answers may
only provide an ongoing revenue source for a limited period of
time. In addition, in some embodiments, some of the answers may not
be revenue-eligible at all, such as answers with which the rapid
answer system was initially seeded, answers that do not include any
responses from revenue-eligible response provider users, or answers
where the requester user was also a response provider user. The
revenue-eligibility of a response provider user may be based on
various factors, such as any enhanced status of the response
provider user and/or whether the response provided by the response
provider user received any negative feedback (e.g., was marked lame
or abusive). Some answers may also not be revenue-eligible at the
time the routine is run if less than all the revenue-eligible
answers are being processed at the current time (e.g., running the
routine on an answer anniversary and the current time is not the
anniversary of the question).
[0099] At step 910, the next answer is selected. If this is the
first question, then the first question may be selected. After
selecting the answer, the routine identifies the response provider
users that gave responses for the answer and are eligible to
receive the revenue share at step 915. Response provider users may
not be eligible after the period of time for sharing revenue for
non-preferred users has passed unless enhanced status has been
granted for at least one of the categories associated with the
answer. Thus, the routine may need to check on the enhanced status
of the response provider users. After determining the response
provider users that provided a response for the answer in step 915,
in step 920, the categories for the question are identified. In
some embodiments, categories may have been automatically determined
by a routine such as the Answer Categorization Manager routine
described with reference to FIG. 10. The next category is selected
in step 925 and in step 930 the portion of the revenue stream for
the category may be determined. In some embodiments, the amount for
each is category is determined by dividing the revenue determined
for the answer by the number of categories associated with the
answer while in other embodiments the revenue may be adjusted by
the relative popularity of the categories. After determining the
amount of money for the selected category, the routine determines
the relative experience ranking of the response provider users with
respect to the selected category in step 935. In step 940, the
routine allocates the category's determined monetary amount between
the response provider users based on the relative ranking. During
step 940, the routine may determine if a response provider user is
eligible to receive a revenue share for this category at all.
Response provider users that do not have enhanced status for this
category may not be eligible after a predetermined period of time
when normal users may no longer receive the ongoing revenue share.
In step 945, the routine determines if there are any more
categories. If so, the routine returns to step 925 to select the
next category. If not, the routine proceeds to step 950.
[0100] During step 950, the routine provides indications of the
allocated monetary amounts. In some embodiments, the routine will
pass the indicated monetary amounts to the payment component 538 of
FIG. 5; however, in other embodiments, the amounts may be stored in
the response provider user account DB 542 of FIG. 5 until the
payments reach a predetermined amount of money. At step 955, the
routine determines whether or not there are more revenue-eligible
answers. If so, then the routine continues to step 910. If not, the
routine ends at step 960.
[0101] In some embodiments, at least part of the revenue stream is
shared with the response provider users who provided responses used
in the answer to a particular question on an ongoing basis.
However, the ongoing revenue stream sharing may end after a period
of time, such as 12 months. In some embodiments, a user may extend
that period of time by attaining enhanced incentive level status.
Enhanced status may be determined in a number of ways, such as
based on the total number of experience points accumulated by a
given response provider user within a category or the relative
ranking of a response provider user (e.g., top 10%) in a particular
category, or instead in a manner that is not specific to a
category. Enhanced status may confer a number of benefits,
including receiving notifications of new questions associated with
one or more categories, and automatically accepting a question to
be answered by a response provider user (e.g., if the question
matches indicated criteria). In some embodiments, enhanced status
may also allow preferred response provider users having enhanced
status to continue to receive ongoing payments for the responses
for a longer period of time than non-preferred response provider
users. Thus, response provider users are advantageously
incentivized to continue to provide answers in order to continue to
receive the revenue stream share for the response provider users'
historical responses. In some embodiments, there may further be
multiple levels of enhanced status. In some embodiments, if a
response provider user was voted to have the best response for an
answer or to be the best response provider user for that question,
the response provider user may be granted quasi-enhanced status in
which the user gains the benefit of having enhanced status for that
answer only, thereby allowing the quasi-enhanced response provider
user to continue to receive a revenue share for that answer for an
extended period of time. As a result, a casual response provider
user may be incentivized to provide high-quality responses.
Additional details regarding the determination of incentive level
status for response provider users are provided with reference to
FIG. 11.
[0102] FIG. 10 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Categorization Manager routine 1000. The routine may, for
example, be provided by execution of the Answer Categorization
Manager component 536 of FIG. 5 such as to categorize answers to
make locating questions to be answered and answers easy as well as
to allow response provider users to gain expertise in categories.
This routine may be invoked in various ways, such as by the Answer
Reward Allocation Manager Routine of FIG. 8 or on a periodic basis,
and in parallel to other routines described herein. The routine
starts at step 1005 where an indication to categorize one or more
answers is received along with optionally additional information to
use in the categorizing. The additional information needed will be
discussed in great detail below. After step 1005, the routine
proceeds to step 1020 where the routine determines whether the
indication to categorize was based on tags supplied by the
requester user. If so, in step 1025, the routine determines one or
more categories based on the question text including the summary
and/or the tags supplied by the requester user. In some
embodiments, at least one of the tags may become a category, while
in other embodiments the system determines the category based on
what category previous answers tagged with the same tags were
categorized. After determining the one or more categories, the
routine proceeds to step 1050.
[0103] If it is instead determined in step 1020 that the indication
was not to categorize based on tags supplied by the requester user,
the routine proceeds to step 1030 and determines if the indications
to categorize were based on responses. If so, the routine
determines one or more categories based on the responses at step
1035. The routine may categorize based on the responses in some
embodiments by checking to see if the response has previously been
given, and if so, of which category associated with the answer the
response is a part. In some embodiments, this may be performed only
on certain types of responses such as links or phone numbers
instead of opinions. In some embodiments, categories may only
become associated with the answer if two or more responses were
associated with the same category. After determining one or more
categories based on the responses, the routine proceeds to step
1050.
[0104] If the request was not to categorize based on the responses,
the routine proceeds to step 1040 where the routine determines if
the request was to use tags from the response provider user to
categorize the answer. If so, the routine proceeds to 1045 to
determine one or more categories based on the tags supplied by the
response provider users. The routine may perform this in a similar
manner to categorizing on tags supplied by the requester user.
After determining one or more categories based on tags supplied by
response provider users or if the request was not to use tags from
response provider users, the routine proceeds to step 1050.
[0105] In step 1050, the routine may use other category feedback to
adjust the categories associated with the answer. For example,
response provider users may vote on the best category in some
embodiments. If a response previously used to determine a category
was removed since it was unhelpful or abusive, the routine may
decide if one or more categories should be unassociated with the
answer as a result. Conversely, if a response was marked as the
best response, then all of the categories associated with the best
response from previous answers may become associated with the
answer. After using the other feedback to adjust categories, at
step 1060, the routine optionally performs additional processing.
The additional processing may include sending indications to the
Answer Reward Allocation Manager routine 800 (e.g., to start the
reward allocation now that categories are determined) or updating
the index used for browsing the answers. After performing the
additional processing, in step 1095, the routine determines whether
to continue. If so, the routine returns to step 1005. If not, the
routine ends at step 1099.
[0106] FIG. 11 is a flow diagram of an example embodiment of an
Answer Experience Level Incentive Manager routine 1100. The routine
may, for example, be provided by execution of the Answer Experience
Level Incentive Manager component 537 of FIG. 5 such as to
determine the revenue stream share that each eligible response
provider user receives for eligible questions. In some embodiments,
the routine may execute periodically in order to determine response
provider user expertise levels for use by other system components,
such as the Answer Reward Allocation component 534 of FIG. 5. The
routine starts at 1105 where the routine receives indications of
response provider users and experience points per category for each
response provider user. In step 1110, the next category or if this
is the first category, the first category is selected. In step
1115, the routine identifies response provider users that have
expertise in the category based on having at least a determined
threshold of experience points in the category. In step 1120, the
next user (or the first user, if this is the first user) is
selected. After the user is selected, in step 1125, the routine
determines the relative ranking (e.g., ordered by increasing number
of experience points) of the user for the category. In some
embodiments, the relative ranking is stored in the response
provider user DB 542 data structure so that it may be displayed in
the account graphical user interface as shown in FIG. 2F. Using the
relative ranking of the user, the routine then determines the
current incentive level status for the category in step 1130.
[0107] After determining the current status, the routine determines
if the current incentive level status is a change from the previous
incentive level status at step 1135. If so, the routine continues
to step 1440 to provide indications of the incentive level status
change for the category (e.g., providing indications to the Answer
Revenue Stream Share Determination Manager component 535 of FIG. 5,
turning on and off enhanced status functionality). If the current
incentive level status has not changed or after providing the
appropriate notifications, at step 1145, the routine optionally
performs additional processing. The additional processing may
include checking if any bonuses have been earned. After performing
the optional processing, the routine determines if there are
additional response provider users with expertise in the category
at step 1150. If so, the routine returns to step 1120. If not, the
routine optionally performs additional processing at step 1155.
Optional processing may include indications to store the rankings
or changing the size of a category based on its popularity. After
performing the additional processing, the routine determines if
there are more categories at step 1160. If so, the routine returns
to step 1110. If not, the routine proceeds to step 1165 to perform
additional processing which may include identifying if any bonuses
are to be awarded based on cumulative point milestones or total
points earned within a period of time. The routine then ends at
step 1199.
[0108] In some embodiments, at least some of the types of users may
sign up with the rapid answer system and receive a user account. In
some embodiments, the account may be a more general account as part
of other sites and/or services provided by the rapid answer system
or as part of a federation of sites that the rapid answer system
participates in. In addition, in some embodiments, at least some of
the types of users may also register to receive a special purpose
account such as a special account for receiving or making payments.
In some embodiments, each type of user (e.g., response provider
user, requester user) has a separate account while in other
embodiments the same account may be shared for all or some of the
types of users. The account then may hold information about the
user including a username and password for user authentication, the
amount of points earned, payment information, categories associated
with the user, enhanced status, and rankings.
[0109] Requester users may ask questions and responses may be
received from response provider users. One or more responses may be
used as an answer to a question and some responses (e.g., abusive
responses) may not be used as part of the answer. Potential
responses include, but are not limited to, one or more indications
of network-accessible resources sites (e.g., a URL ("Uniform
Resource Locator") or a URI ("Uniform Resource Identifier")) where
the response provider user found the information, book/magazine
citations, database citations, phone numbers, email addresses and
opinions. In addition, in some embodiments item provider users that
provide products or services may pay money to provide additional
responses relating to their products or services. Viewer users may
review the answers to previously answered questions. However, the
type of a user is not mutually exclusive. Thus, in some embodiments
a user that asks a question about plumbers in Seattle may still
answer questions relating to martial arts and/or review previously
answered questions about solving a margin problem in the Microsoft
Word.TM. word processing application. In some embodiments, a given
user may indicate the role (e.g., requester user, response provider
user, item provider user, viewer user, etc.) that the user is
currently performing in order to access and/or receive the
appropriate graphical user interface for interacting with the Rapid
Answer system. For ease of understanding, however, the different
types of users are referred to as if the various types of users are
distinct. Furthermore, in some embodiments, at least some of the
users may be an entity (e.g., corporation, group, association,
etc.) and not an individual person.
[0110] Questions and answers to those questions may be gathered via
the Rapid Answer system. Various types of questions may be asked
via the Rapid Answer system. Questions may in some embodiments be
as varied as finding local products or services, to determining
what foods are healthy, to finding reasons for cleaning fuel
injectors. Questions include any request for information whether or
not the request ends in a question mark or multiple inquires are
made within a single question. In addition, in some embodiments the
topics of at least some of the questions may be restricted. For
example, in some embodiments, only questions about one or more
predetermined topics (e.g., local products and/or services) may be
asked and answered. In other embodiments, questions deemed
inappropriate (e.g., adult topics and/or topics involving
potentially illegal activity) may be prohibited or restricted
(e.g., by enforcing age restrictions on access to adult content) as
appropriate.
[0111] A requester user may indicate a question and one or more
tags for the question. In some embodiments, the Rapid Answer system
suggests tags based on term words in the question text, tags
indicated by the requester user, and/or metadata associated with
the question and/or requester user. In some embodiments, additional
information (e.g., summary text, an amount of time during which a
question may be available and/or active for users to provide
responses, etc.) may be supplied by the requester user. The
question may be presented to response provider users in order
receive responses to the question. Questions may be presented to
users in various ways including programmatic notifications via
email, instant messaging or other suitable method based on term
words within the question and/or categories associated with the
prospective answer to the question. In addition, presented
questions may be arranged by term words, category, initial reward
type, reward value, the time the question was made, and/or the time
the questions expire. In some embodiments, users may access
questions via full-text search. In some embodiments, at least some
of the response provider users may not have the ability to have
questions presented to them in all of the previously mentioned
manners. In addition, the number of response provider users may be
limited to a predetermined number; thus, response provider users
may indicate that they are working on a response in some
embodiments.
[0112] Response provider users may then provide responses to the
questions. Factual responses may in some embodiments require the
response provider user to acknowledge the source of the
information. If clarification is needed to answer a question, a
response provider user or an item provider user may ask for
clarification from the requester user in some embodiments. In some
embodiments, previous responses from other response provider users
may be hidden from other response provider users. When a question
is finished, at least some of the responses may become an answer to
the question and a number of experience points may be awarded for
the unique responses to the question. In some embodiments, at least
some of the responses may not be used in the answer, such as
responses that are abusive or lame (i.e. unhelpful). A question may
be considered finished in various ways such as after an indicated
time period for the questions has elapsed, after a predetermined
number of responses, or after responses from a predetermined number
of response provider users.
[0113] Experience points may be awarded for each category. In one
embodiment, experience points for the question may be determined
and then divided by the number of unique responses. Then, the
points for a unique response may be divided by the number of
response provider users that provided the response. In some
embodiments, the determined point allocation for each of the
response provider users is divided by the number of categories
associated with the answer. Categories may include in some
embodiments one or more associated tags and may be automatically
generated from the responses and/or tags supplied by both requester
users and/or response provider users. In addition to awarding
experience points, the response provider user may in some
embodiments be provided with at least a portion of the requester
user-specified reward or a reward for one or more bonuses (e.g.,
for the best answer, best response provider user). Additional
details related to experience point allocation are provided
elsewhere.
[0114] Responses may be presented to the requester user and/or
viewer users. In some embodiments, a user may see responses as they
are provided by, or received from, response provider users. Various
other items, including advertisements, responses from item provider
users, and/or sponsored links may be displayed along with the
responses. Additional methods of generating revenue other than
advertisements may also be utilized to generate a revenue
stream.
[0115] In some embodiments, a requester user may provide feedback
about various responses such as marking the response as lame (e.g.,
on topic but unhelpful) or abusive (e.g., off-topic response). In
addition, in some embodiments, if the response to a question was an
opinion, the requester user may request one or more follow-ups to
the opinion. In some embodiments, response provider users that
provided a response to a question may also provide various types of
feedback about the question and/or its associated responses, before
and/or after experience points are allocated. For example, response
provider users may in some embodiments be able to suggest tags,
vote on a best (or even a primary) tag for the answer to be used in
identifying a category for the answer, vote for the best response,
vote for the best response provider user for a given question, or
indicate that a response is lame or abusive. In some embodiments,
other users who did not provide a response to the question may also
provide feedback. As a result of user-provided feedback, the
expertise point allocation for the responses may be altered
accordingly. Additional details related to feedback are described
below.
[0116] In some embodiments, since at least some individual payouts
of cash to, for example, a response provider user may be small, the
amount earned may be aggregated until the amount of money earned
exceeds a predetermined amount of money (e.g., $5.00). In some
embodiments, the amount owed the response provider user may be
associated with the response provider user's account and include
all earnings whether from the revenue sharing, initial reward (if
any), and any cash bonuses. In addition, in some embodiments,
instead of awarding cash, a non-cash equivalent value may be
alternatively awarded such as gift certificates or frequent flier
miles (or other loyalty points). Some or all of the bonuses such as
receiving a certain milestone in experience points in a category
may be added to money owed the response provider user or given as a
non-cash gift (e.g., gift certificate).
[0117] In some embodiments, when a requester user submits a
question, the Rapid Answer system may check to see if the same
question has been recently asked and answered. If the system
determines that question has been previously asked and answered,
then the Rapid Answer system may provide the answer to the
previously asked question and not present the question to response
provider users. In some embodiments, as a result, no experience
points are awarded; while in other embodiments, bonuses may be
awarded to response provider users that previously answered the
previously asked question or the revenue stream share for that
question adjusted (e.g., more revenue allocated for the
question).
[0118] As noted above, some embodiments may interact with or
otherwise utilize systems for interacting with human users to
supply tasks to be performed and to receive corresponding results.
As described in more detail in U.S. patent application Ser. No.
10/990,949, some such systems may provide functionality related to
obtaining and using information about qualifications of users such
as to allow other users to identify and/or specify types of users
with whom to conduct transactions. In some embodiments,
qualifications may be automatically determined for response
provider users and utilized to determine which response provider
users may be provided access to particular questions. For example,
qualifications may be associated with tags and/or categories that
are utilized in conjunction with questions, responses, and answers.
As response provider users provide answers and thereby gain
experience points and corresponding expertise levels in particular
categories, they may be granted qualifications associated with
those categories, which may in turn enable the response provider
users to gain access to questions that require such qualifications.
In addition, requester users may further associate qualifications
with provided questions in at least some embodiments such that the
provided questions may only be accessed by and/or answered by
response provider users who have obtained the appropriate
qualification. In addition, qualifications may be automatically
associated with questions based at least in part on the tags and/or
categories associated with such questions (e.g., associate a Java
programming qualification with a question that uses the tag
"Java"). Embodiments may also associate qualifications with
questions based on other factors, such as if the reward offered for
a particular question is greater than a predetermined amount (e.g.,
associating qualifications with questions that have rewards greater
than $5, where the type of qualification is based on one or more
tags associated with the question).
[0119] In some embodiments, systems for interacting with human
users to supply tasks to be performed and to receive corresponding
results may be utilized to specify tasks related to questions,
responses, and/or answers and assigning such tasks to human users
for performance. For example, tasks may be specified that consist
of categorizing questions, and human categorizer users may perform
such tasks by choosing appropriate categories for questions and/or
answers based on associated content, metadata, and/or tags. Such
categorizer users may be rewarded in various ways, such as with
money and/or by earning experience points or qualifications related
to performing categorization tasks. Other types of tasks to be
performed by human users are also contemplated, including tasks
that consist of editing or otherwise improving the quality of
supplied questions and/or responses. For example, human performance
tasks may be generated that include selecting or otherwise editing
tags associated with questions, or editing the content of questions
and/or responses to improve grammar or other characteristics.
[0120] As previously discussed, in some embodiments electronic
messages may be used to send commands to the Rapid Answer system.
In one example embodiment, a non-exclusive list of such commands
are as follows:
TABLE-US-00001 Command Name Description unhelpful indicates that a
particular response is not satisfactory abusive indicates that a
particular response is inappropriate and/or spam like indicates
that a particular response is good best indicates that a particular
response is great buy x allows a user to buy more question
submissions and/or items from one or more item suppliers pay x y
allows a user to pay another user x an indicated amount y confirm x
confirms a previously indicated purchase reject explicitly cancels
a prospective purchase help provides a list of available commands
resubmit allows a requester user to resubmit a question if not
satisfied with any of the responses; may only be available once for
each question info gives basic information about a user's account,
such as number of questions remaining, list of last 20 questions
asked by the user, and unique identifiers for the questions search
x allows a user to search for questions view x allows user to see
answers to question x categories provides most popular categories
that the user has not subscribed to sub x allows a user to
subscribe to category x unsub x allows a user to unsubscribe to
category x join x indicates the user wants to receive emails about
responses to and comments about question x unjoin x indicates the
user no longer wants to receive emails about responses or comments
for question x block x prevents the sending of any more responses
or comments from user x find x locates one or more items
corresponding to x and displays the price, the items may be
subsequently purchased using the buy command
In the table, x and y are parameters that may follow a command,
although in some cases the parameters may be optional. For example,
"confirm" may in some embodiments not require a parameter. This
list of commands is merely exemplary, and in other embodiments more
or less commands may be available.
[0121] In some embodiments, the commands may further be used as
part of a message authentication process. For example, after a
requester user has set up an account with payment information, when
a requester user needs to buy more questions, the requester user
may send a message to "buy@rapid-answer.com" and in the body of the
message type "buy XX" where XX is the number of questions that the
requester user wants to purchase. After the Rapid Answer system
receives the message from the requester user, the system may send
back a confirmation request message to confirm the purchase, with
the message having a tracking identifier. When the user receives
the confirmation request message, the user may reply to the message
by typing in "confirm ####", where #### is the user's 4-digit PIN.
If the user entered the wrong number of questions to buy, the user
may also send a message with the "reject" command to prevent the
transaction from occurring. When the Rapid Answer system receives
this message, it matches the tracking identifier and the 4-digit
PIN, and if both match the system completes the transaction. Such a
combination of the tracking identifier and knowledge of the PIN
facilitates authentication of the user.
[0122] The commands may also be used in other manners in some
embodiments. For example, a user may be able to search for and buy
items via a mobile device. First, the user signs up for one or more
mobile services and selects a preferred payment option (e.g., by
placing a credit card on file), a preferred delivery address (e.g.,
home address) and delivery method (e.g., 2-day ground). Afterwards,
the user may send a message to the Rapid Answer system to find the
particular item by typing "find item", where item is a description
of the item (e.g., a unique item number, such as ISBN or SKU
number). The Rapid Answer system receives the message from the user
and may send to the user a list of one or more items matching the
description and a price for each item. The results may include an
item identifier for each item and a tracking identifier. After the
user receives the message with the search results, the user may
select one of the products for purchase. The user purchases the
item by replying to the message and typing "buy item XXXXX", where
XXXXX is the item identifier supplied by the Rapid Answer system.
The Rapid Answer system then receives the message and attempts to
match the tracking number. If tracking number matches the sent
tracking identifier for the user, then the system sends a
confirmation request message that specifies the prospective
purchase. The confirmation request message may have another
distinct tracking identifier, or instead may have the same tracking
identifier as in the search result message. After the user receives
the confirmation request message, the user may reply back by typing
"confirm ####", where #### is his/her 4-digit PIN. When the Rapid
Answer system receives the confirmation message reply back from the
user, it tries to match the tracking identifier and the 4-digit PIN
for the user, and if both match proceeds to process the item
purchase for the user. The item is then sent to the user's
pre-selected delivery address (e.g., home address) via a
pre-selected delivery method (e.g., 2-day ground). Additional
functionality such as allowing a mobile user to specify the
delivery address and/or delivery methods may also be performed.
[0123] A user may also in some embodiments be able to pay another
user via a mobile device. In such a person-to-person model, users
may sign up with a payment service. After signing up with the
payment service and supplying at least one payment method, a user
may send money to another user via messages with the Rapid Answer
system. The user may, for example, send a message to the Rapid
Answer system (e.g., "pay@rapid-answer.com") containing the body
"pay otheruser@domain.com 10". After the system receives the
message, the system may send back a confirmation request message
with a tracking identifier. The user receives the confirmation
request message from the system and may reply to the message by
typing in "confirm ####", where #### is the user's 4-digit PIN.
When the system receives the confirmation message back from the
user, it tries to match the tracking identifier and the 4-digit
PIN. If the tracking identifier and the 4-digit PIN both match, the
system may deposit $10 into the account of the other user and
obtain the $10 (possibly with an additional processing fee) from
the user making the payment.
[0124] Although the previous scenarios were discussed as occurring
via the Rapid Answer system, in other embodiments some or all the
functionality may be provided by other systems, such as the systems
of online merchants. In addition, it will be appreciated that some
embodiments may utilize various mechanisms to enhance the security
of such payment transactions, including capping the amount of money
that may be transferred on a per-transaction basis (e.g., a maximum
of $50 per transaction) and/or per-time period (e.g., a maximum of
$100 per day). Other security mechanisms may include verifying that
a generated command message includes information likely to be known
by a valid user but unlikely to be known by a malicious user. Such
information may include valid tracking identifiers (as described in
more detail with reference to FIG. 2Q), shared secrets (e.g.,
passwords and/or personal information such as mother's maiden
name), and/or reference tokens that indicate predefined payment
instructions (as described in greater detail with respect to U.S.
patent application Ser. No. 11/200,880). Also, the message may be
sent securely, such as via HTTP/S or via encryption and hashing
prior to being sent to/from the Rapid Answer system.
[0125] As previously mentioned, in embodiments where rewards may be
allocated to response provider users who provide responses to
questions, the rewards may be calculated in various manners. For
example, rewards may be allocated based at least in part on
feedback from the requester user who asked a question and/or the
response provider users who provided responses to the question.
Response provider users who provided a response to a question may
provide feedback on the responses from other response provider
users that provided a response to the question.
[0126] As one specific example, feedback from requester users and
response provider users regarding a response may consist of rating
an answer as great, good, okay, unhelpful, or abusive. The feedback
from the various users may be translated into numbers to be used in
creating a normalized rating of the response, such as follows:
great=+2, good=+1, okay=0, lame=-1, and abusive=-2. These numbers
may then be entered into the formula below to calculate a
normalized rating of the response.
Normalized Rating = 2 * RUR + 1 n R PUR n n + 2 ##EQU00001##
In this formula, RUR stands for the rating supplied by the
requester user who supplied the question, RPUR.sub.n represents the
rating from response provider user n, and n is the number of
response provider users who provided feedback about a response. As
shown by the formula, the rating of the requester user who asked
the question is worth twice the rating of a response provider user
in this example. For example, suppose that the ratings are as shown
below:
TABLE-US-00002 Response Response Response Response Requester
Provider Provider Provider Provider User's User 1's User 2's User
3's User 4's Rating Rating Rating Rating Rating Response Great
Can't Lame Lame Okay Provider Vote User 1's Response Response
Abusive Good Can't Good Okay Provider Vote User 2's Response
Response Lame Okay No Vote Can't Lame Provider Vote User 3's
Response Response No Vote Good No Vote No Vote Can't Provider Vote
User 4's Response
Then, the normalized rating for response provider user 1 is:
2 * Great + Lame + Lame + Okay Number of answer provider user
ratings + 2 ##EQU00002##
As a result, the normalized rating is:
2 * 2 + - 1 + - 1 + 0 3 + 2 = 2 5 = + 0.4 ##EQU00003##
Thus, according to the table below, which maps the normalized
rating to experience points, response provider user 1 is awarded +5
experience points for the response.
TABLE-US-00003 EXPERIENCE NORMALIZED RATING POINTS RATING Great +20
points +1.5-+2.0 Good +10 points +0.5-+1.5 Okay +5 points -0.5-+0.5
Unhelpful -10 points -1.5--0.5 Abusive -20 points -2--1.5
In answers that have multiple categories, the same number of
experience points may be awarded for each category, while in other
embodiments the experience points may be divided between
categories. In addition, in some embodiments categories suggested
by response provider users may not be used for reward allocation
unless the category has been determined to be the best category,
such as based on voting by the response provider users and/or in
other manners (e.g., based on requester user feedback). However, if
so, all categories suggested may be used for other purposes (e.g.,
available for searching on).
[0127] As a continuation of the prior example, response provider
user 2 receives a -0.4 normalized rating, and thus receives +5
experience points despite the response being marked as abusive by
the requester user. However, in some embodiments, since the
response was marked as abusive, the abusive response will
nonetheless be tracked and used against response provider user 2 in
other manners, such as to temporarily or permanently ban response
provider user 2 if response provider user 2 gives too many
responses marked as abusive by requester users. Continuing to apply
the formula for this example, response provider user 3 receives a
-0.75 rating and has 10 experience points deducted for the response
(i.e. is allocated -10 experience points).
[0128] In some embodiments, if there were not at least a
predetermined number (e.g., three) of ratings received, then the
response by default is deemed to be okay and is awarded +5
experience points. Thus, response provider user 4 may be awarded +5
points for the response provider user 4's response to the question.
In addition, the response provider user with the highest normalized
ratings--assuming that it is over a predetermined normalized rating
(e.g., +0.5)--may be determined to be the best response and awarded
a bonus of +10 experience points. In the event of a tie, the
requester user's rating will be utilized to break the tie and if
there is still a tie, neither response may be determined to be the
best response. Penalties (e.g., deducting 50 experience points per
category, tracking the response provider user for possible banning
from the Rapid Answer system, etc.) may also be assessed in some
embodiments for failing to submit a response after accepting a
question. In some embodiments, responses from item provider users
may also be rewarded with experience points based on feedback about
the item provider user's response and/or the item provider user may
provide feedback to be used in the allocation of experience
points.
[0129] In some embodiments, various security and/or fraud measures
may be utilized. For example, in some embodiments, users may
sign-in to the Rapid Answer system with a username and password.
Various logs of activity may be utilized to prevent and deal with
fraud and security breaches. Limits may be placed on the number of
questions from the same requester user a response provider user may
answer within a set period of time. In addition, the same person
may not be allowed to both ask a question as a requester user and
answer the question as a response provider user.
[0130] Those skilled in the art will also appreciate that in some
embodiments the functionality provided by the routines discussed
above may be provided in alternative ways, such as being split
among more routines or consolidated into fewer routines. Similarly,
in some embodiments illustrated routines may provide more or less
functionality than is described, such as when other illustrated
routines instead lack or include such functionality respectively,
or when the amount of functionality that is provided is altered. In
addition, while various operations may be illustrated as being
performed in a particular manner (e.g., in serial or in parallel)
and/or in a particular order, those skilled in the art will
appreciate that in other embodiments the operations may be
performed in other orders and in other manners. Those skilled in
the art will also appreciate that the data structures discussed
above may be structured in different manners, such as by having a
single data structure split into multiple data structures or by
having multiple data structures consolidated into a single data
structure. Similarly, in some embodiments illustrated data
structures may store more or less information than is described,
such as when other illustrated data structures instead lack or
include such information respectively, or when the amount or types
of information that is stored is altered.
[0131] From the foregoing it will be appreciated that, although
specific embodiments have been described herein for purposes of
illustration, various modifications may be made without deviating
from the spirit and scope of the invention. Accordingly, the
invention is not limited except as by the appended claims and the
elements recited therein. In addition, while certain aspects of the
invention are presented below in certain claim forms, the inventors
contemplate the various aspects of the invention in any available
claim form. For example, while only some aspects of the invention
may currently be recited as being embodied in a computer-readable
medium, other aspects may likewise be so embodied.
* * * * *