Launched this week, Yam is a video Q&A app from entrepreneur Michael Cho. Users offer a bid to ask experts and influencers questions, or pay $0.05 to watch previous answers. Whale, a new app from Twitch founder Justin Kan, lets influencers set their own price to answer questions in personalized video Q&As.
“Our ultimate vision for Whale might be described as Quora for the Snapchat generation,” Kan wrote on his website. “As selfie video has become part of the cultural zeitgeist, the perceived cost of production of video has actually become less than that of text: it’s easier to take a short video of yourself than sit down and write a blog post.”
Like livestreaming video, human-based search platforms facilitate emotional depth and immediacy beyond what search engines or even journalists can provide. Yam, which aims to re-center the search process on storytelling, features as one of its key influencers Abdulkhafi Alhamdo, a father who shares videos from Aleppo, Syria.
Google likely won’t go the way of the dinosaur any time soon. But new search platforms challenge our fundamentals in an age of connection, showing the possibilities for better search integration with mobile technology and conversational platforms like Amazon’s Echo. As technology advances, the fundamentals of connection are still up for grabs.
