Just a few days ago, Yahoo! Search announced that they would be integrating Yahoo! Answers with their mobile search service.
Yahoo! Answers is a website where you can ask *any* question (well, within reason) and have it answered by a community of over 95 million users worldwide. I explored this concept in depth earlier this year, rising to one of the highest ranking members on Yahoo! Answers in Australia (and even being profiled on the Yahoo! Answers Australia blog).
In general, a question posed on Yahoo! Answers will get replies within a matter of a few minutes, from a range of opinions, ranging from genuine experts through to users trying to “game” the system (users get “points” for replying, so there can be a number of junk replies to any given question).
My thoughts at the time were that this “informal learning” paradigm would be well suited to the mobile medium – short questions and brief answers, with an around-the-clock, global answering community. However, at that time, the service was not yet mobile – accessing Yahoo! Answers on a PDA browser was pretty much impossible, let alone a mobile phone.
Yahoo! Search’s latest announcement means that the brief answers submitted to Yahoo! Answers will now be accessible using mobile search… which brings part of the Yahoo! Answers paradigm to mobile devices. It’s only a matter of time now before users should be able to submit questions for answering using the mobile devices too. 
Keep an eye out… in the future, Yahoo! Answers may provide you with a personalised question-and-answer service in the palm of your hand.
technorati tags:yahoo, answers, search, mobile, question, answer, m-learning, mlearning, mobile learning, mobilelearning, mobile-learning, informal, education
