The reason I’m jealous is Yahoo Answers provides a super easy and accessible way to attain this goal. You log in, enter your question and can get an anwer very quickly! Yahoo has a points system that encourages good behaviour, ie, quality answers.

That brings me to one of the limitations I would see to such a seductive system of Q and A:

- Who will respond to my question? Will it be someone I’m close to in terms of background and personality, and even geographically? I mean if my neighbour answered my questions on raising kids, I probably wouldn’t want her advice, because we have so little in common. If someone in the UK answered, whereas i’m in San Francisco, it wouldn’t help me too much either…

The idea behind a closed community like Frenchparents was that:

- It would first of all provide a safe place to ask all sorts of questions, even personal ones
- It would bring together those who took the effort to sign up to the site by filling out a loooong form and to pay a huuuge membership fee ( $20 to $35 a year)!
- It would bring together parents in a given geographical area, with similar references and constraints- like the excessive amount of sunshine and fresh air one gest living San Francisco…

- The other cautionary note to Yahoo Answers is the following. This is another giant mega tera database of us being held by a giant, woldwide company. From the categories we ask our questions in, Yahoo can infer our areas of interest and know yet a little more about us than where we live and our name, which they knew already. It just feels weird to me to have all this personal information held by a large corporate entity thats more powerful than any country governement…

Now with Frenchparents, members know some of the personal information they may provide is stored by a teeny, tiny entity with no power whatsoever!

The web sure isn’t boring these days…