It's a great example of building value on top of passively collected data from another kind of activity. Millions of programmers visit and participate in StackOverflow forums to find and share free, community-vetted discussions about their technical challenges. Now the site will help them transform that activity into a resume that employers can find and evaluate. It's free for job seekers; the cost for employers is $500 for one week of access or $5k for one year subscription, with a money back guarantee if an employer doesn't find anyone to hire.

When it comes to creating value, though, connecting employers with highly qualified technical candidates is one of the clearest examples of value this paradigm has created to date, outside of targeted advertising.

Stack Overflow is building out a network of community Q&A sites on a wide variety of topics. It's not hard to imagine this same type of system being offered for types of work other than computer programming.

Also at Launch and addressing the need of finding qualified candidates, in this case consumer service providers, is another startup called Thumbtack. Presumably we'll see many more services like these; as a growing number of people and businesses become quantified, the days of making business decisions on a short list of contrived recommendations and the pedigree of a resume will soon be surpassed.

Reddit's goal for this data is to see it used to create a recommendation engine - in particular a system that would highlight some of the niche communities on Reddit that are a great place to find good topical content, but that too few people on the site have discovered. Now that the data is out in the wild, however, any number of analyses can be performed on it - and no one knows what kinds of observations about the relationship between people, web content, voting and news will be discovered. One little account preference opens up a world of opportunities: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."

"It's great to have these kinds of data dumps available for research," says Joel Spolsky, co-founder of the popular StackOverflow network, which makes its user data available in a bulk dump every month, under a Creative Commons license. "We've had several academics analyzing our data dump and learning interesting, measurable, scientifically relevant things about online communities. You never know what's going to come out of it."

Chris Dixon, co-founder of recommendation service Hunch, said the Reddit data and recommendation effort are a "great project." "I think I'll have our devs hack something together using the Hunch API," he said. "We have a blog recommender widget [of our own] coming out soon." Dixon's company is one of the most prominent startups aiming to build a "taste graph" and Hunch already offers recommendations that impress many people, on a wide variety of topics.

Real-world recommendations, profile analysis for increased self-awareness and scientific insights into the nature of online life: those are the kinds of things people are building now with publicly available social network user data.

Nowhere in the world is there more opportunity to develop such insights based on user data than on Facebook. Facebook used to hand over data dumps of its users activities to big companies doing research without communicating that to the users. Now, a much larger company, Facebook is maddeningly unwilling to offer bulk data export for research and analysis. Perhaps in part because people are so upset whenever the release of data is perceived as a violation of online privacy.

That's an easy problem to solve, though, if Reddit is any indication. Just ask users if they want to check one box: "allow my data to be used for research purposes."

Please, Facebook?

Today, the latest version opened for private beta. GIS StackExchange is for people involved or interested in Geographic Information Systems. The beta is restricted to members of the Area51 GIS community but the public beta will begin on the 29th.

Via Jason Birch

But "Web Applications" is just the first of many new StackOverflow-like sites on the horizon, and surprisingly, the next sites to launch may not be tech-focused at all. ]]> Stack Exchange Uses Crowd-Sourcing to Launch New Sites

StackOverflow, the original site that led to the Stack Exchange network's creation was founded by Joel Spolsky, author and CEO of bug-tracking software company Fog Creek Software, and respected developer Jeff Atwood back in 2008. The idea was to create an alternative to the market leader at the time, Experts-Exchange (EE). Where EE was a fee-based site, the vision for StackOverflow was to offer a simpler, entirely free site where you could get the same type of assistance from knowledgeable users. To encourage participation, site users vote up the best answers to questions and those whose answers are voted on receive boosts in their "reputation" scores.

Earlier this year, the company raised $6 million from Union Square Ventures and announced plans to launch a handful of targeted sites running the same software. Spolsky said that the future sites would be determined by an automated process where community members propose a site, establish the site's ground rules and gather a team of core experts who commit to the site. When a critical mass has been built up (the boiling point determined by algorithms alone), the site opens. You can see this process in action now in StackExchange's new staging area, dubbed "Area51." Here, you can track the proposed sites, how many people have committed to them, details about the site's plans and goals, and, once launched, stats on number of users, questions, answers, views and more.

Web Applications, the Q&A site for "expert and advanced users of Web applications" was the first site to go through this automated launch process and a site for "Gaming" is now hot on its heels.

While the newest addition to the network is certainly a handy resource (we already learned how to print a Google Wave and organize Gmail labels), it's the site staging area that's the most impressive part of this whole venture. Instead of the company having to think up ideas, gather interest, entice experts to sign up and encourage people to join, the entire process has been offloaded to the community itself to handle. It's crowd-sourcing at its best.

Beyond Tech: StackOverflow's for Cooking, Guitar and Grammar?

The site staging area will allow Stack Exchange to extend beyond its tech roots, assuming the future proposals in Area51 prove popular enough to reach the launch stage. Sites for food and cooking, English language and its usage, home improvement, photography, board games, coffee, guitars and other less-technical hobbies are listed among the geekier topics like SEO, game development, GIS, user interface design, healthcare IT and more.

The question now is how will these niche Stack Exchange sites compete with the one-stop shops, like the recently launched Question and Answer service Quora, which provides a single destination to ask questions about anything? Or the more personal Q&A offering from Formspring, which lets individuals share answers with a community on conversational topics. Plus, we can't ignore the fact that Facebook, too, is planning a Q&A app called "Questions." Can anything complete when Facebook - and its nearly half a billion users - get involved? And will Stack Exchange's niche answers fare as well as Yahoo Answers when it comes to being highly ranked by Google's algorithms?

Stack Exchange's move from a tech-related resource to a network of sites with broader appeal is a smart move, given the interest in the question-and-answer space at this time. But it also opens it up to bigger competition as well. It was one thing to take down Experts Exchange, but can it do the same with Facebook and Yahoo?

StackOverflow is a simple concept: People post technical questions about computer programming, other people post answers, and then users of the site vote the best answers to the top of each page. Reputation is accrued over time as your answers get voted on, and programmers on both sides of the questions love the service. Some advertising and a job-posting service based on the reputation programmers have built up by answering questions on the site have made StackOverflow profitable for months.

Fast, free, high-quality answers to technical programming questions is something there was substantial demand for. The market leader for years has been a site called Experts-Exchange, a fee- or performance-based service founded in 1996 and the favorite target for StackOverflow's rhetorical slams. In 2008, Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, a widely respected developer in his own right, founded StackOverflow, named after the technical phenomenon wherein too much memory is used by the data stack storing data about active subroutines.

The site came out of closed beta in September 2008 (we covered it first among general interest tech blogs). Then it hit 3 million unique visitors just 4 months after launching. In October 2009 the company announced Stack Exchange, a service that offered white-labeled installations of the StackOverflow software for use by anyone else. In December, Stack Exchange was selected by Google to power the Android Developer support forums. The site is thoroughly cool. For example, it periodically offers data dumps of all its user data in aggregate, under a Creative Commons license, for outside analysis of the social dynamics between users and more.

Plans for the Future

It's generally acknowledged that the Stack Exchange vision of white labeling for anyone didn't work. Spolsky says that very few communities really picked up enough steam and the licensing fee meant that a community had to be lead by someone who was both capable of managing the community and of monetizing it, two criteria that whittled down the number of candidates quickly. (See MathOverflow for an example of a really good, super-nerdy niche site that did work, though.)

Now Spolsky says the plan is for the company to launch a handful of very targeted sites running the same software but focused on offering objective answers to technical questions in other verticals. The StackOverflow community has a running vote on what the first sites will be about, and leading ideas include statistics and data visualization, GIS, mathematics, search engine optimization, home repair and the care of firearms.

Spolsky says that future sites will be rolled out through an automated process wherein a number of people will propose a site, then debate the ground-rules for content on the site and then gather a core group of experts to commit to the site. Once an algorithm has determined that a critical mass has been built on a topic, then a new site will open up on StackOverflow's own servers.

Spolsky says that programmers have joined StackOverflow because it's a lot like blogging, but with a lower barrier to entry. Busy professionals join the site and share their knowledge for the joy of sharing it, and because they benefit from the collective wisdom offered there. He believes that there are a good number of other fields where there are objective answers to technical questions and where people care more about the right answer than they do about what their friends have to say about something. Spolsky says the much-hyped Quora is a nice competitor but has a different, more social vision - and a long way to catch up to StackOverflow's 7 million monthly uniques.

Spolsky says the decision to raise money and assemble the top-shelf team that he has was motived by the realization that StackOverflow is an unusual opportunity. "It's very rare, but we saw an opportunity to get big fast," he told us by phone. "We're not going to have to worry about the cost of servers, hiring a few people, getting office space. Before I would have walked around New York for weeks looking at all the office space to save $2k/month. We don't have to be careful anymore. We have the confidence to blow this out on a worldwide basis. We're a top 700 site on the Web today; we want to be a top 70 site."

He says he didn't expect to be out raising money, but the type of business StackOverflow became - and the opportunities that backers offered - made it a clear choice. "I've always been against the concept [of raising money]," he told us. "For the vast majority of businesses, it just doesn't make sense. There are a very limited number of opportunities in which VC makes sense, and I didn't expect to be in one of them, but suddenly StackOverflow revealed itself to be one of them."

Spolsky says that the easiest way he's heard people explain the difference between StackOverflow and old fashioned forums is that when you go to StackOverflow, the right answer is at the top of the page. That's a charming way to put it and it's sure to be interesting to see the team that's assembled take a shot at building that kind of experience around other kinds of topics.

Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets around 1.8 million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A sites for companies, too. The site's latest merit badge is an official nod from the Android team, which has announced StackOverflow as the official home of Android developer Q&A support.

Nurik further noted that StackOverflow's format was particularly helpful for beginners new to the Android platform. However, he did state, "It's also important to point out that we don't plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there."

The StackOverflow "Digg for developers" model has worked well for all kinds of programmers, clearly. The models has also been successfully applied to such diverse topics as mathematics, parenting and even World of Warcraft - all built on the company's StackExchange white-label platform.

The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.

The Big Idea

The idea behind StackOverflow is to offer a really well designed site where programmers can find answers to questions that are more obscure than they can get answered elsewhere. Site founders Spolsky and Attwood are software gurus focused on developer relations and user experience. They've got a very capable team with them as well, as is evidenced by the product so far.

The community is for developers working in any programming language and use of the site is completely free. The name StackOverflow refers to an infinite loop or recursion in the programming languages C or C++ and sure enough, a lot of the conversation on the site is self referential so far. The team's got plans for that, though, so we're confident this will be less the case than it is on other sites.

So far, we like it a lot. What does it look like? Check out these screen shots.

Screen Shots

The front page.

My Question Got Answered!

I got a good answer to an admittedly simple question, in 2 minutes. Awesome.

Asking a Question.

Pretty smart UI here, quite helpful and fun to use.

A User Profile

Above, the top half of a user profile, below the bottom half. Note that you can see how often a user votes things up or down but you cannot see specific voting history. The user feed is nice.

Our Thoughts

The UI here has lots of really nice little touches, it's responsive, communicative and relatively clear. We like it a lot and that was one of the site's big goals, to build an effective UI.

Account creation looks very good, it happens automatically via cookie until you register, but OpenID association with your account is not implemented particularly well. Attwood is blaming OpenID providers for that on Twitter, but we're seeing a few too many problems to buy that.

There's already an active community of beta testers on the site and they've developed extensions like a Firefox and IE7 search plugin, a couple of Greasemonkey scripts and a Ubiquity script. That's pretty awesome.

There's a sophisticated credibility system at work here, where users who build up their reputation are given new capabilities. Those capabilities include commenting on questions instead of just answering them and doing some moderation.

The "community mode" is interesting, things are wiki style on the site and once a certain number of edits have occurred the original asker of the question no longer owns it - it becomes a community question, with lower credibility thresh holds required for interaction, etc. The Community User username is tied to these threads and acts as an automated bot repairing things like malformed tags through out the site. That sounds really helpful.

Finally on the positive side, we got some good replies to our questions really quickly and we're already having a lot of fun just browsing the site.

The Down Sides

We like StackOverflow a lot so far, but there are some real concerns that deserve to be raised. As the site's owners have voiced throughout its development, the quality of discussions may go down rapidly when they open up to the world at large. We hope that's not the case but we will watch the reputation and bios of the people who answer our questions.

More importantly, perhaps, we're not sure the Digg-style home page is the best way to organize these discussion. Is it on the basis of the newness or hotness of questions that things should be ranked? Or should top answers be highlighted? We know that the site's developers have spent a lot of time wrestling with these questions, so we won't pretend to know better, but we hope the core prioritization principles work out well in this context.

There are some features that we expected to see here but don't. An easy way to mark a thread for reading later would be really helpful, as would a feed for those items in our account. A feed for answers given to our questions would be nice. So would the option to get an email notification when one of our questions is replied to, or another question we're interested in. GetSatisfaction's "I'm interested in this too" feature would make a world of sense - let me know when someone else gets an answer to this question because I'm curious. Finally, a "thanks for this" button like Ma.gonlia would make sense and offer a different kind of feedback.

We've already subscribed to the feeds for several topic tags and we're excited about everything we expect we can learn from the StackOverflow community. General availability of the site is expected sometime this week or next.