ChasNote

Anil Dash sums up why Matt Haughey, the lone man behind the curtain at Metafilter and Ask Metafilter beat Google Answers:

“MetaFilter has a long history of being influential online and in the media world at large. Members think highly of themselves and of their peers on the site, often with good reason. Being respected by that group is something to be desired…

“There’s also an existing community of tens of thousands of MetaFilter members which seeded the Ask MetaFilter site — a strong and active base of early adopters. This is in contrast to a point Matt himself made while talking about the site:

‘Google Answers is gone because Google isn’t in the people business, they’re in the computer programming business.’

“With the exception of Orkut and YouTube, Google doesn’t really do community websites. That’s not a criticism — they get a lot of leverage out of having a smart python script do the work of hundreds of humans….

“In short, Google doesn’t have a community to leverage.“

Go, Matt!