I punched through a dozen or so and 100% of those were rhetorical.

You need to combine it with some NLP like Kevin's doing here: http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/

I had a lot of rhetorical questions too. Also, Kevin's solution is not 100% waterproof - just looked through some "negative reviews" for ServInt and they weren't exactly negative. Maybe you could build a bayesian filter of some kind? (I'm not sure how Kevin filtered his reviews exactly?)

Maybe he could add a third button, "Not a question", classify each question into "answerable question" and "not a question" categories (according to which button the user clicks) and see which category new questions are classified into using a naive bayes classifier? I think it could work quite well

Kevin here. No, it's not perfect and never will be. I definitely use a bayesian classifier in our process among other things.

That said, if you see mistakes, please flag them! My system does get smarter with more data, so when people flag mistakes for us to correct, it makes a difference both immediately and in the long run.

If you have any other thoughts/critiques/ideas please feel free to let me know :)

No, thats perfect, it'll get better by time if it learns :)

I got 5 questions in a row like 'Do you want to meet there at that time?' which were direct twitter messages to specific people. This needs more filtering as others have commented.

It bugs me to see this on TechCrunch and HN when there are great submissions that did not get such opportunity (example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4804373).

Very impressive Maarten.

I especially like your localisation efforts! The unique URL's fitting for each language are amazing. Do you feel this is a big boon to spread fast? Are you yourself a good speaker of those languages, or did you ask external help for the translations/domain name suggestions?

I speak Dutch, English and reasonable French. For German and Spanish: Google translate to the rescue :-)

To be honest, the German site (dufragst.es) reads exactly like that ;-) You might want to look into getting some translation help, some parts of the site sound quite unnatural.

It's probably not going to be very good then. :)

To shuttering next Friday if the current trend on here is adhered to.

That is pessimistic to say the least. Time will tell how much traction it receives, and next steps for the project.

I really like the idea. 30 seconds is intense and turns it into a game. A way to "cheat" is to hit reply and if you aren't signed into Twitter a window pops up with whatever you have typed in so far and gives you an infinite amount of time to finish your response.

I answered 1/1 questions and it was about vibrato when singing. Now I'm having a discussion about it. Happy to help this person learn to improve their technique.

Direct link to subject site:

http://youasked.it/

to bragging to HN (Friday)

Great idea and execution.

Still, I'd really recommend ditching the ad at the bottom and focusing on perhaps a single call-to-action, like following on Twitter or liking on Facebook. I know it's tempting to try and monetize something like this but overall the ads and share buttons just kind of junk it up.

Both the idea, and how fast it all came together, is awesome. Great job!

I wonder what twitter's reaction will be if this keeps growing, considering all the recent talk about them being hostile towards people making the most out of their API.

Did the app hit the Twitter API limits? I can't see any questions...

So how did you build it? What programming language, what tools? Where hosted? This is a very impressive project for only one day of work, so give us the details.

Great idea! Keyboard shortcuts for the interface would be really nice, since I end up "nexting" a lot of questions before I tend to find one I want to answer.

Neat! Feel a bit awkward tweeting at strangers though.

It is just like HN posting at strangers.

nice to see this idea being picked up again. I had a similar idea quite a while ago (early 2010), although I didn't build it on top of the twitter API (which in retrospect might have been better). http://askcue.com is still online and you can anonymously ask questions. btw. it seems that the site doesn't work atm.

nice idea but right now the implementation is full of fail. I got 5 questions, none of which I could answer (directed at their friends / rhetorical) and then I got asked if "this was fun" and to tweet about youasked.it

Please make sure that the user actually answers a single question before asking them to tell their friends how much fun they're having.

I wonder how they are not hitting the twitter API limits, probably fetching a whole bunch of questions and caching them ..

Goed gedaan Maarten! Building a product in a weekend is always very cool, but to get on TechCrunch too is even better!!

The link to the French question page is not working http://repon.se

It would be good if you let us see what others have posted as responses - especially if they're funny!

you can see replies on twitter...

i have gotten two so far:

'shut up' and 'thank you!'

My question: "What do they call turkeys in Turkey? #hmmm"

(You have 30 seconds to answer.)

really liked it. just one thing: i'm not a native english speaker, so it takes me a little more time to tweet an answer. would be nice to have the timer to halt when typing...

you should define some filters for the target repliers and to notice that is a real question. e.g. #q.code.java .

Listeners/repliers would subscribe those.

I love it

pretty fun for trolling strangers tbh

i didn't come across one serious question though. just a bunch of random nonsense 'where do we go when we die??' 'should i go to sleep???' etc

Monetize, improve, rinse and repeat.