When ChaCha launched in 2008, most of us were introduced to it through a friend. We added its number to our flip phones and sent our questions off via text message, gleefully showing our friends how quickly we received responses. It was like Google, only mobile. Now Google is mobile, and an estimated 35% of Americans have smartphones. But instead of becoming obsolete, ChaCha has shifted its focus toward mobile apps, Q&A as a form of content and a social redesign that could challenge crowdsourced Q&A sites such as Quora and Yahoo Answers.
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As the company continues to answer one million to two million questions every day by text message, it answers about as many through its web and mobile presences. In the last year, it has answered about 800 million questions -- bringing its all-time total to 1.8 billion. It recently started answering questions for large municipalities' 311 initiatives.
Here's how ChaCha has stayed relevant as smartphones have proliferated and a barrage of Q&A apps -- highbrow, social, local and otherwise -- have launched their own takes on Q&A.
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Remaining Different
What separates ChaCha from other Q&A services is that its answers are not crowdsourced, but researched by a swarm of about 180,000 freelancers who are paid up to 20 cents per question. Some of them pull answers to repeat questions from ChaCha's ever-growing database. Others specialize in a particular topics. All need to take a training course and pass a test before they can participate.
The result is nearly instant, usually correct answers, something that other Q&A platforms that rely on goodwill don't often provide. And creating them is almost exactly the same process no matter what platform they are delivered to.
Going to the Web and Mobile Again
ChaCha's Android app launched last week. Mobile apps for iPad, BlackBerry and Windows are also in the works.
While much of ChaCha's perserverence can be attributed to an answering system that has stayed the same, to stay relevant, it made big changes. One year after it launched its text message service, it launched a website. A year after that, it launched its first app. With each new platform it has inched further into becoming a service that is just as much about reading other people's questions as it is about asking them.
The website, which had 18 million unique visitors in October and 25 milliion in November, allows users to browse questions by categories. The iPhone app added the ability to browse recent and nearby categories.
ChaCha CMO Shawn Schwegman says, "70% of the people who use the apps don???t ask a question. They???re looking at the categories that they???re interested in."
That, and probably at questions such as "If a vampire and a zombie get in a fight, who wins?" that are mixed in with those from students obviously cheating on tests ("What challenges did President Truman face after World War II?") and from those who haven't gotten over the magic ("ARE YOU a REAL PERSON?").
Trending topics on ChaCha often mirror news events. After it was announced that Steve Jobs had died, for instance, ChaCha got 18,000 questions about his life and death.
"People hear things on TV and then they ask the question of ChaCha," Schwegman says.
That this sounds a bit like Twitter hasn't been lost on the company. Its wheels have been spinning on the social question for some time.
Planning For a Social Twist
To cater to users' demonstrated interest in what their friends are asking questions about, ChaCha has put a number of interactive features in the pipeline. For starters, it plans to add a scalable map that shows where the millions of questions per day are coming from.
"The big difference here is that when questions are popping, they?re answered," says ChaCha Head of Mobile Product Mick Oppy. "It?s not like, oh, here?s a question.' We?ve actually completed an answer."
Schwegman says that the company has also been thinking of ways in which it will allow users to communicate with each other for the first time at some point next year.
"There?s a huge barrier to entry for the kind of answering that we do," he says. "For other Q&A platforms to move into the real time Q&A space would be very difficult. However, it?s not that difficult for us to move into the crowdsourcing space."
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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