Introduction Ammas online service is an advice site based on the Ask Agent Technology. It is vaguely related
to what we have here at epinions, the difference mainly being, on Epinions we review products, while on Ammas we answer queries that people asked by other people. Some other such advisory site are Google Answers, Arzoo.com etc.
How it works As mentioned earlier, this site is based on the Ask Agent Technology. Simply put it works in the following manner. A user posts a query under one of the mentioned topics on the site. A set of
advisors who are called Council Members, give some rating to the query. Based on the user rating and council rating, the query is given a weightage and posted to the advisors. The advisors can answer these queries. These answers would again be rated by the council and user. The advisors would earn points for each
question based on the final rating of their answers.
The advantage that ammas provides here:
1) The value of the questions can be increased by the user posting the query. More the value, more the advisors would be willing to answer the query.
2) At the end if the users want they can get the answers posted on some professional format given by ammas staff for a few points.
3) Users can give feedback as to whether the answers actually sufficed their purpose or not.
4) The points for the question follows a time value concept. So the earlier the question is answered, the more value available for the advisor.
Players @ Ammas 1) Advisors: Anybody who registers at Ammas is by default an advisor. An advisor can post queries and can answer queries.
2) Featured Advisors: Something like Featured Reviewers here at epinions. These are the people who have earned a minimum number of points from answering queries in the past three month cycle.
3) Council members: The top 25 percentile of the featured reviewers form the council based on the points earned by them in the past three cycle.
4) Ammas Staff: Ammas staff are themselves registered as an advisor at the site and from time to time keep interacting with the council of members and advisors through queries or postings.
Ammas Points system Every new advisor is given a few points on joining Ammas. From them on the advisor can accumulate points either by answering queries or by paying some money to Ammas site.
Similarly, every advisor gets points for answering the queries based on the Council and User rating. The points tend to be more if the answers are provided earlier in the lifecycle of the query and tend to get less as the time wears off on the question.
Pros of the site 1) One of the best answer sites on the Internet today. The site has huge collection of topics right from career, business, education to books, entertainment, movie reviews to astrology and relationships.
2) The infrastructure provided for the advisors is pretty good. The best part is during the last two years when I have been using the site, there has been a constant endeavour by the Ammas Staff to improve the site.
3) The rating mechanism is quite decent, given the complexity of setting up one for the purpose of this site. The ammas staff have done a good job of involving the advisors to devise the rating mechanism which gives more general acceptance to the rating mechanism as well.
4) The quality of the answers for most of the questions asked is pretty decent and the best part is usually you get an answer within 24 hours for a query.
Cons of the site 1) The biggest con of the site is its speed. To be fair, the Ammas staff seem to have realised these and during the past two months, I have seen the speed go up pretty drastically, but still it needs to improve a bit.
2) The UI for asking the query. The UI for asking queries can further be improved.
3) There is no actual money in there for the advisors. Though the Ammas staff are saying that they are trying to evolve a strategy to pay the advisors based on the points they earn, till now they have not be able to evolve the strategy.
Summary Summarizing the review, I feel it is a good site for sharing information, asking questions and answering. In my case, it''s more like a hobby to shoot of answers to queries or to review the products rather than a money earning experience. So for me Ammas.com really kicks, because I get to answer a lot of queries and occasionally put in some queries of my own.
For the concept, implementation and constant improvements, I would give this site a 4 star rating in the advisory sites category.