The Wondir Foundation

by Matthew Koll, Chairman of the Wondir Foundation

The Wondir Foundation was the original developer of the Wondir Q&A service, found for one more day at www.wondir.com.  The Wondir service is shutting down as of April 30.  I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my perspective as a founder of that service.

Wondir started out on the cutting edge of the Live Web.  When we launched Wondir in 2002 it offered a unique combination of instant messaging, search, forums and alerts.  We made up the term “Live Q&A” to distinguish our service from traditional message boards and from search engines.  We had lofty goals:  

To connect people who have information needs with the people and information that can help them. To give people fast, simple access to the thousands of organizations, corporations and service providers, and millions of individuals throughout the world who want to help others by providing information, guidance and expertise.

Over the last seven years Wondir users have answered millions of questions for each other.  I’d like to thank the many people who contributed so much to the Wondir community – especially the individuals who provided those millions of helpful responses.   And most especially to those who strove to maintain a sense of a caring, helpful community – even upon viewing the millionth version of, “My boyfriend and I only did X.  Could I be pregnant?”

Looking back over the various changes that have taken place in this time period -- to the company, to the user community, and to the marketplace -- I think we can say that Wondir has been a positive force.

The Live Web of 2009 now offers people a myriad of ways to connect with other people for answers, opinions and help – ever faster and more extensively.  The addition of Summize to Twitter brought real-time search for conversations into the mainstream.  Ask’s new Q&A search tab is very cool.  Facebook and LinkedIn Answers make it easy to tap into your social network’s knowledge.  The emergence of new entries like aardvark, Mahalo Answers and kgb, joining the field with more established sites, such as Yedda, Answerbag, WikiAnswers and Yahoo! Answers, demonstrates both how crowded that space has become and how people believe there is much growth and opportunity ahead.  

Its a great time to be working towards what's next.  How do we move beyond Q&A, beyond real-time search, beyond the social grid as gab-fest and self-promotional frenzy?  How do we tame the stream and put it to work for good?  Danny Sullivan has identified a new generation of services that he calls "help engines".  That sounds right to me.  And creating simple public infrastructure that enables help engines to extend their reach while at the same time honing their focus seems like an excellent fit with the mission of the Wondir Foundation.  That's what we're working on.  Stay tuned.

This is the Wondir Foundation's new site. Since 2005 all we had was a few pages buried deep inside the wondir.com site ... so its nice to have our own place again.