Danny's post has info on the success of Yahoo's Q&A product in terms of traffic and participation. We'll save the discussions about these services and traditional information quality metrics for some queries for another time.
Btw, Google's shutdown is not the first time a major search player has shutdown a Q&A service. From early 2000 through May 2002 Ask Jeeves offered a human powered Q&A service called Answer Point. This SEW Blog post from about a year ago offers a look at that service.
Don't Forget What Libraries Offer For Free via the Web
While all of this has been going it has been disappointing to see little attention paid to virtual reference services offered by the library community, many of which are available 24x7x365 from any computer connected to the Internet. Perhaps organizations like OCLC (the provider of QuestionPoint) and other services from around the globe can use this closure to bring more attention to their services as another option for the end user. Not THE solution but as part of the mix. We will have to wait and see but let's hope so.
This ResourceShelf post has more about the FREE Q & A services (virtual reference) services offered by the library community.
As Danny points out in his post, other Google products have gone away but perhaps might return one day. One service ResourceShelf believes is ripe for a return run in one form or another is Google Voice Search*, which has had a "come back later" note on its page for a couple of years. The coming and going of various services also plays to comments made by
Marissa Mayer, estimated that up to 60% to 80% of Google’s products may eventually crash and burn.
“We anticipate that we’re going to throw out a lot of products,” says Mayer. “But [people] will remember the ones that really matter and the ones that have a lot of user potential.”
For info pros, Mayer's words should remind us of what we have known for a long time. That it's important to know about a variety of services/books/etc. from variety of providers/sources. This is good for the info pro and more importantly for the end user. Similar words about search not being a zero sum game have been spoken by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
* Want to Try a Voice-Activated Info Tool? Tellme.com continues online and on the telephone. It's been around for many years. Dial 1-800-555-Tell. Call is free but make be aware of any long distance charges that your phone provider might charge.
A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »
Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.
A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?
Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.
What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?
Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).
FreePint Family
Quilting big data threads
The fallacy of information overload
Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure? 
