The Kindle Will No Longer Answer Questions: No More NowNow

Well for those of you who have been using the Kindle to answer your homework questions or to just amuse yourself when you are bored, you are just going to have to get on your computer and do a Google search. I found today that NowNow will be officially shut down.

If you go here to Amazon's help page it says:

Kindle NowNow was a free experimental feature that is no longer available. As part of our Experimental efforts, we remove or add Experimental features based on customer interest and focus on features that Kindle customers are excited about.

I am not sure if Oprah's mentioning of NowNow led to the downfall. Jeff Bezos was asked by Oprah about a month ago about NowNow and he had to tell her that the Mechanical Turks answered the questions. I am sure a lot of people thought a crack team of "brainiacs" was sitting at Amazon answering the questions. Unfortunately, anyone that signed up could answer them from the web so there may have been a quality control issue. I have seen reports on the web of users receiving rude answers.

On the other hand it may not have been very cost effective to spend time and money answering stupid questions. Don't get me wrong, I think it could be great. Suppose I just got to my hotel after a long flight and wanted to find the closest Chinese restaurant. I ask my Kindle and a few minutes later I get up to three answers, awesome! I spoke with a person who was answering questions (a Turker) and many questions were not working that way. People were asking market research questions hoping to save money, asking for homework and book report answers, or just asking rude questions. Some people must have been just bored asking questions about lengths of body parts (you know the one I am talking about) or bathroom humor type questions.

Either way, I am going to miss NowNow.