MSN QnA

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

~ the last words ~

In Turkey the letters MSN meant one product. Not a portal, not a search engine, not a homepage: a chat window with a nudge button. Microsoft spent that decade hanging the MSN name on dozens of services and here it never came loose from the messenger, so when this site was rebranded MSN QnA in february 2009 it took a name that Turkish usage had already assigned to something else. i never saw the site. It was in english, it was aimed at an american audience, and it lived at an address most people outside that audience never had a reason to type.

Microsoft's own record puts the beta at 16 march 2006, under the name Windows Live QnA. Search Engine Land's writeup of the closure dates the beta to august 2006 instead. Neither correction has ever been made and the two dates sit in the public record next to each other, so both are printed here. You asked a question, tagged it by topic, and the community had four days to answer before a best answer was chosen.

The whole economy of the thing was points. One for signing in, one for casting a vote, four if you voted for the answer that won, five for answering at all, and twenty for giving the best answer. Breaking the code of conduct cost fifty. You could vote a hundred times a day and no more. Under your name sat a row of stars, calculated as best answers over total answers across the whole life of the account, which meant everybody started at zero and had to work in public.

~ the record ~

~ the names ~

It launched as Windows Live QnA in 2006. When Windows Live Search became Live Search on 21 march 2007 it was dragged along and became Live Search QnA. On 18 february 2009 it was renamed again, to MSN QnA, as Microsoft moved consumer properties back under the older brand. It closed on 21 may. The final name was on it for three months and two days.

None of the renaming was about the product. It was about an argument Microsoft was having with itself over what to call the consumer internet, an argument that ran from 2005 to 2009 and produced Windows Live, Live Search, MSN, and finally Bing. A site whose value was entirely in the people who kept showing up got its identity rewritten three times while those people were showing up.

~ the actual end ~

Microsoft's closing note said that they were closing the QnA site, but that the experience of running QnA and gathering all of the great feedback shared with them would certainly influence future product direction. Google had already shut Google Answers in 2006 with a similar line. Yahoo Answers, the enormous and unruly version of the same idea, kept the traffic.

The timing is the part worth noticing. QnA went dark on 21 may 2009. Seven days later Microsoft announced Bing, and on 3 june the search engine went live. The question and answer experiment was cleared off the desk in the fortnight before the company bet the consumer division on a search brand instead.

~ the long tail ~

The archives went with it. Three years of questions and answers, written by people working for points, had no export and no successor site to be folded into. Wikipedia's link to the official website is now a link to the Wayback Machine, which is the standard grave marker for anything that lived on a live.com subdomain.

qna.live.com still resolves, and what it does now is redirect you to Outlook. Type the address of Microsoft's abandoned question site and you land in a mailbox login. The domain was worth keeping. The thing built on it was not.

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