AskMeNow

» see askmenow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The supported-carriers page is where this one keeps its distance. AskMeNow ran on Alltel in the United States, and on Rogers and Bell in Canada, and the shortcode 27563 meant nothing to a phone anywhere else. A Turkcell handset in 2006 could send that text and get back the silence you get from a number that does not exist. This was a product sold through American carrier billing, and carrier billing is the most nationally bounded thing on the internet.

What it did was simple and, for about two years, genuinely useful. You sent a question by SMS the way you would text a friend, or you opened m.askmenow.com in whatever browser your phone pretended to have, and you got an answer back rather than ten links. The categories on the front page were the whole 2006 mobile internet in one list: 411 lookup, movie times, flight times, sports scores, local weather, stock quotes, plus Wikipedia search sitting at the top of them.

The company launched in November 2005 out of Irvine, California, run by Darryl Cohen, and it was public, which is why the numbers are on the record. It signed content for the answers rather than scraping them, so the licensing list ran through Merriam-Webster, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the NHL and Guinness World Records. That is a respectable stack of sources to put behind a text message, and it cost money every month whether anyone texted or not.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fifty four thousand dollars ~

The fiscal 2007 filing is the shortest possible version of what happened. Revenue for the year: $54,536. Net loss for the year: $20,435,000. Thirty two employees. That is not a company with a demand problem or a pricing problem, it is a company whose product was being used by approximately nobody while it kept paying for the content licenses and the payroll anyway.

The other half of the model made it worse. AskMeNow was not purely automated. When the parser could not resolve a question, a human read it and wrote back, which is the same bet ChaCha and kgb were making in the same years with much larger call centers behind them. Human answers are wonderful and they cost a person's minute each. Free ones cost a person's minute and nothing else.

~ askwiki ~

The most interesting thing the company ever built was a side project. AskMeNow partnered with the Wikimedia Foundation on a beta called AskWiki, which put natural-language parsing over English Wikipedia so that a question returned a specific answer instead of a relevant article. In 2007 that was an unusual thing to be attempting and an unusual partner to be attempting it with.

It ended for reasons that had nothing to do with whether it worked. Jimmy Wales announced Wikia Search, a search engine of his own, and a foundation-adjacent partnership with a small public company doing question answering stopped being convenient. The technology AskWiki was reaching for arrived properly about a decade later, from companies that did not need carrier billing to survive until then.

~ the last live page ~

Wikipedia says AskMeNow ceased operations in late 2008 and the archive does not agree. On 5 January 2009 askmenow.com was serving its normal front page, ticker AKMN in the header, a We're Hiring link in the top navigation, the whole category list intact. The 5 February capture is the site's own internal redirect, which means something was still answering.

By 21 April 2009 the same address was a parking page, and the archived version of it is bleak in a specific way: an ad-broker keyword list built from the domain name, offering Ask An Expert and Ask Proxima and Go Ask Alice, none of which had anything to do with the company that had been there in January. A question-answering service ended up as a page of guesses about what the word ask might mean.

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