# NowNow is Discontinued



## vg (Oct 28, 2008)

I finally had a question for NowNow and received an answer back that is has been discontinued.  Sigh....


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!  Say it ain't so?!?!?!?!?!?


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

No NowNow now? Nooo!  Um what was that?


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## Jesslyn (Oct 29, 2008)

vg said:


> I finally had a question for NowNow and received an answer back that is has been discontinued. Sigh....


Look on the bright side - Maybe they'll have to give us a Kindle update to remove that option from the Experimental choices and at the same time they'll slip in some of the requests we've been sending in. (Can anyone say 'folders'?)


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

Yes, I just got the same message. Oh well, I had only used it once or twice so it won't kill me if it's not there anymore.

I swear it was Oprah that did it in. She spent more time raving about NowNow than she did talking about how to work the Kindle itself! And then one of the NowNow workers posted that they were totally overwhelmed with a backlog of questions after the show. Thanks, O!  

L


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## vg (Oct 28, 2008)

Jesslyn, I like how you think!
Vampyre,  NowNow was a service where you could ask any question and receive up to 3 answers back from real people who researched the internet.  Now, I have to live with the knowledge that I was not able to fully experience all that my Kindle was capable of - that'll teach me not to wait!  I'm now off to download some music....


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

Oprah is the devil's hand maiden.  Just before I was able to buy my Kindle, they were shipping out in 2-3 days.  After her evilness, it went to 2-3 weeks and delayed my Kindle's arrival.  She is evil! Now NowNow is no go because she overloaded them! Evil evil evil!!!


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## Sailor (Nov 1, 2008)

It was Kimblee that made everyone at NowNow pull their hair out and quit, this was his post before 
they all walked out:



> I asked something to NowNow. I asked it a question I already knew the answer to, and got a response in 15 minutes, with more info than I asked for. (I rated it great). I then asked it a very obscure question about carborators in a Gremlin, and I have not gotten a response yet, and it's been over two hours.


Just kidding Kimblee and everyone. I just thought it was funny to read this this morning and now find out they Discontinued it.


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

!  Is she Oprah in disquise?


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## luvmy4brats (Nov 9, 2008)

Well that stinks. Now I'm actually going to have to start looking up the reading order of my series books.


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## ScottBooks (Oct 28, 2008)

It just let me submit a question. I'll let you know if I get an answer.


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## luvmy4brats (Nov 9, 2008)

ScottBooks said:


> It just let me submit a question. I'll let you know if I get an answer.


I just did  I got the same answer..

NowNow Discontinued..

Not that I didn't believe you VG..I'm the type who touches the plate when told that it's hot just to check.


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

Now NowNow is now NotNow?  Bummer


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## ScottBooks (Oct 28, 2008)

Yep, Discontinued; an answer I rated as Junk: Off topic or inappropriate.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

NowNow is now WasWas. . . or maybe GoneGone

I never used it anyway. . .guess I never will. . . . .oh well!

But, as someone else observed:  perhaps we'll soon get a software upgrade removing the NowNow option and adding a 'content organization system', aka FOLDERS

Ann


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

We saw your thread and I wanted to respond (I'm one of those people you guys liked to abuse on 'the other side'   ).  We were just as blindsided as you are as the queue of questions was slowly dropping earlier today, then rapidly picked up in the past hour or two until they disappeared altogether.  We don't even have any idea what may have transpired to make them discontinue the service (we have ideas, but what finally was the straw that broke the camel's back we don't know).


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## Linda Cannon-Mott (Oct 28, 2008)

catnapped said:


> We saw your thread and I wanted to respond (I'm one of those people you guys liked to abuse on 'the other side'  ). We were just as blindsided as you are as the queue of questions was slowly dropping earlier today, then rapidly picked up in the past hour or two until they disappeared altogether. We don't even have any idea what may have transpired to make them discontinue the service (we have ideas, but what finally was the straw that broke the camel's back we don't know).


Thanks for your response catnapped. We have many members that use nownow.


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

Catnapper, while you're here, "Why is the sky blue?"  Just kiding.  

Do all those people that answered the question lose their jobs or do they have other things to do?


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

Greetings, Catnapped, and thanks for letting us know about your experience with the cancellation.

Do you think there's any chance they might bring it back as a pay per use, or subscription, service?  Say, 10 to 25 cents per question?  Or 49 to 99 cents per month?  That would get rid of the folks just goofin' 'round and would still leave the service available for those folks that seriously want to use NowNow.  I for one would be willing to pay a small fee to use, or have access to, the NowNow service.

Regards,
Alexia


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

Thanks for the update, Catnapped. We appreciate hearing from you.

Take care,

Leslie


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

Vampyre said:


> Catnapper, while you're here, "Why is the sky blue?" Just kiding.
> 
> Do all those people that answered the question lose their jobs or do they have other things to do?


Being we're what's considered independent contractors, Amazon really can't fire us (they can ban us, but that's about the extent of termination). As for other work, there are other things we can do, but these were probably among the most lucrative so they'll definitely be missed.

Xia, I believe the intention was to have NowNow as a paid service at some point in time (around a quarter a question was to be the cost), but something must've made them reconsider that business plan.

(BTW, I threw back that Gremlin carburetor question...if you did get a response, wasn't from me  )


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

I think Kimblee broke it with his question about the carburators in a Gremlin...he had his other question answered... 

http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,863.msg17118.html#msg17118

Betsy


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

If I may politely point out...our esteemed member Kimblee is a he, at least according to his profile.

L


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Leslie said:



> If I may politely point out...our esteemed member Kimblee is a he, at least according to his profile.
> 
> L


Oops, fixed it... (blushing)

Betsy


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> Oops, fixed it... (blushing)
> 
> Betsy


Don't worry, you weren't the first! I noticed quite a few "she's." Obviously Kimblee is not around to complain. He must have his nose buried in his Kindle. LOL.

L


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

<---guilty Of all people I should know better.  Everyone thought I was a girl for a while.


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

There are rumors going around that the web browser may be next on the chopping block.  Unconfirmed at this point (and given the communication they provide to us--little or none, you may not know until it's too late), but I thought I'd let you know.


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

drat.. sounds like they are looking for ways to cut costs here.


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## Lynn (Nov 4, 2008)

Oh that would be too bad, liked being able to download from feedbooks from my kindle


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

Lynn said:


> Oh that would be too bad, liked being able to download from feedbooks from my kindle


You would still be able to. Just download the feedbooks catalog to your Kindle. It shows up like a book and you can just pick books out of it for delivery via whispernet.

L


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

We've received "official" word from TPTB that NowNow is dead and will be removed from Kindle (likely the next software update).  Puts to rest any speculation about it returning in a different form in the future.


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

catnapped said:


> There are rumors going around that the web browser may be next on the chopping block. Unconfirmed at this point (and given the communication they provide to us--little or none, you may not know until it's too late), but I thought I'd let you know.


Oh. That would not be good. That's how I get my books from manybooks onto my Kindle. And having wireless web access was a big selling point for me. I'm very sad to see that they're rapidly removing some of the very features that enticed me into buying my Kindle in the first place. I expect that they'll start charging for the whispernet service soon, too? I wonder if they knew they were going to drop all these nifty features when they did the Oprah infomercial...


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## Mikuto (Oct 30, 2008)

The Powers That Be never give an adequate explanation for things.


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## Leslie (Apr 7, 2008)

Xia said:


> Oh. That would not be good. That's how I get my books from manybooks onto my Kindle. And having wireless web access was a big selling point for me. I'm very sad to see that they're rapidly removing some of the very features that enticed me into buying my Kindle in the first place. I expect that they'll start charging for the whispernet service soon, too? I wonder if they knew they were going to drop all these nifty features when they did the Oprah infomercial...


I absolutely do not believe that they'll start charging for Whispernet. This is core to the device and one of the big selling points. It is what differentiates the Kindle from other devices that do charge, like cellphones.

My 2 cents.

L


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

Mikuto said:


> The Powers That Be never give an adequate explanation for things.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200137070&#nownow

Kindle NowNow was a free experimental feature that is no longer available. As part of our Experimental efforts, we remove or add Experimental features based on customer interest and focus on features that Kindle customers are excited about.


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## vg (Oct 28, 2008)

Wow - Catnapped - thanks for all of the good information!


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## Mikuto (Oct 30, 2008)

Sorry cat, I was being somewhat facetious at your use of TPTB. Thanks for the link though


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

catnapped said:


> http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200137070&#nownow
> 
> Kindle NowNow was a free experimental feature that is no longer available. As part of our Experimental efforts, we remove or add Experimental features based on customer interest and focus on features that Kindle customers are excited about.


Hmm, seems to me that if the NowNow folks were majorly backlogged, and getting an answer took several days as of late because of the swamped question queue, then that would indicate that there _were/are_ a whole lot of Kindle customers that were/are *very* "interested" and "excited" about using the NowNow feature. So, I'm not buying amazon's reason for discontinuing - I'm thinking that they were just no longer willing to foot the NowNow bill. Which, of course, is their option. I just wish they wouldv'e explored the possibilty of transferring the NowNow costs to those Kindle customers that would be willing to pay to use it. Hrumph.


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## Teach142 (Oct 28, 2008)

Would it help if we all sent the people at [email protected] emails telling them we want it back?  They might just think we are interested.  I'm going to my email now and do just that.


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## supermom (Nov 19, 2008)

Well that's a bummer I hadn't even had the opportunity to use nownow.  I guess I'll never know what I'm missing out on.


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

Teach142 said:


> Would it help if we all sent the people at [email protected] emails telling them we want it back? They might just think we are interested. I'm going to my email now and do just that.


Yep, I'll definitely be doing that. And I'll be throwing in something about _please, please, keep the web browsing feature_, too.

I wonder if there is a way to do a "We want our NowNow back, and we want it NowNow!" petition...


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## Dori (Oct 28, 2008)

Just wait until Oprah asks it something and it be be back beback.


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## Teach142 (Oct 28, 2008)

XIA, you took the words out of my my mouth.  I told them, please, please...  I tried it only once and was amazed by it.  I feel so cheated now.


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## Guest (Nov 21, 2008)

That's it don't complain to Amazon, complain to Oprah.  She will fix 'em!


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

Dori said:


> Just wait until Oprah asks it something and it be be back beback.


Several of us were wondering what happens if they rerun that episode next year. Do they edit parts of it out or add disclaimers that some services are no longer available?


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## marianneg (Nov 4, 2008)

I'd noticed some funny behavior.  I asked a fairly easy question a couple of days ago (what is the scientific definition of a meter), and I got no responses until just now.  (And I have been turning on Whispernet and checking for new items at least once a day.  Darn that bargain book thread!)  I got three responses all at once, that must have been answered before today based on catnap's information.  Oh, well, back to google.


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

marianner said:


> [...] Darn that bargain book thread!)


Ha! Tell me about it!


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## ScottBooks (Oct 28, 2008)

I'm not surprised about NowNow's demise. Anything even remotely associated with Askville is doomed to be dragged into a circle of Hell sooner or later.

On a brighter note; I think I read that Wikipedia would always be available. Ergo: the web browser (pitiful as it is) should stick around.

Didn't I read that somewhere vaguely authoritative??


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## marianneg (Nov 4, 2008)

ScottBooks said:


> On a brighter note; I think I read that Wikipedia would always be available. Ergo: the web browser (pitiful as it is) should stick around.
> 
> Didn't I read that somewhere vaguely authoritative??


If it was on the internet, it must be true


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

I love the Wikipedia option, that would bite if they took that away!


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## ScottBooks (Oct 28, 2008)

This is on the Kindle homepage on Amazon (The one with the pricing and features listed)

_*# Includes free wireless access to the planet's most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia-Wikipedia.org.*_

I did read it somewhere 

This is there too:

_*Wireless Access to Wikipedia
Kindle also includes free built-in access to the world's most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia-Wikipedia.org. With Kindle in hand, looking up people, places, events and more has never been easier. It gives whole new meaning to the phrase walking encyclopedia. *_


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## Xia (Nov 10, 2008)

ScottBooks said:


> This is on the Kindle homepage on Amazon (The one with the pricing and features listed)
> 
> _*# Includes free wireless access to the planet's most exhaustive and up-to-date encyclopedia-Wikipedia.org.*_
> 
> I did read it somewhere


But... didn't they used to say the same about NowNow? (Which now ThenThen as far as Kindling is concerned.)


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## sebat (Nov 16, 2008)

That's sad but I'm not surprised.

My understanding is that NowNow questions were answered by Amazon Turk.  Anyone can go on the Turk board and make money answering questions.  I think at one time Turk was paying $.25 an answer for NowNow.  A months or so ago, Amazon stopped paying for answers and instead gave people a chance for a cash drawing for each question answered.   After that, I don't imagine many people continued to do all that work for no pay.  

I should probably add...I don't know anything for sure.  I'm just making assumptions here.  Don't want to start any rumors.


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## Dori (Oct 28, 2008)

I too heard of low pay for the answerers and the fact that NOW NOW was not being used as expected.  People just started trying to see if they could stump the answerers.  The users are the ones that dealt the death blow.


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## yogini2 (Oct 27, 2008)

I'm going to miss NowNow.  Wikipedia is okay for the basic answer, but I would get some thoroughly researched answers besides the lazy wikipedia source from NowNow.

Also not buying their explanation.  As in all public responses from corporations,  they decide for some reason they don't want to provide a service and then come up with a somewhat plausible explanation.  We will never know what bee got up someone's backside and stop the service.

Yogini


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## Guest (Nov 22, 2008)

My guess is that anytime whispernet is used not buying books it is cutting into the profit margin.  "free access programs are nice but they cost too much to provide them.

This is my guess and nothing more.


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## pidgeon92 (Oct 27, 2008)

You have to think that the Whispernet internet access, if people are really using it, does cost Amazon a fortune. I've tried it for testing purposes, but if I had to use it to be productive I would be hanging a rope from the chandelier. I've contemplated suicide waiting for my iPhone to make a connection, and it has a proper browser.


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## Teach142 (Oct 28, 2008)

I wrote to Amazon and requested they bring back Now Now.  Here's the response I got back:


Greetings from Amazon.com. 

Kindle NowNow was a free experimental feature. We wanted to see how much customers used the feature and for the most part they didn't. As always, we focus on the features that Kindle customers are excited about.

Thanks for using Kindle and we appreciate your comments.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:


Funny, how it took about 3 days to get a response two weeks ago.  I thought it was a hit and backlogged at that time.


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## catnapped (Nov 21, 2008)

Teach142 said:


> I wrote to Amazon and requested they bring back Now Now. Here's the response I got back:
> 
> Greetings from Amazon.com.
> 
> ...


That's baloney...they just didn't want to put the effort into running it (the way it should've been). Plenty of people used it during the year it was a part of Kindle (and the two additional years they were beta testing the PDA service).


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## cerberus (Nov 24, 2008)

Teach142 said:


> Kindle NowNow was a free experimental feature. We wanted to see how much customers used the feature and for the most part they didn't. As always, we focus on the features that Kindle customers are excited about.
> 
> Thanks for using Kindle and we appreciate your comments.
> 
> ...


At least you got a response. As somebody who is also answering questions at MTurk, I can tell you that this is a big exception that you

1. Get a response at all
2. Get a response that has something to do with the question

Here's my theory taking into account this thread and some threads in the "Turker Nation", the board turkers are discussing (which will answer the question above about the payment- and bonus-system):

- Amazon pays $0.25 for every answer given to a "Kindle"-question. Every answer being rated "Great" will be used for the weekly competition where the best 30 people receive an additional bonus ranging from $100 to $13.
- Amazon also offers other questions from NowNow (sent in by email, SMS, etc) and Askville. Answers being given for Kindle- and NowNow being rated great are counted as one (regular NowNow-questions are payed $0.03), great Askville-answers (payed $0.02) are counted as 10 votes. So you need 10 great Kindle-answers to be equal to one answer given to Askville.
- Amazon doesn't like it very much that questions concerning the Kindle itself are answered by somebody else than the Kindle Customer Support. So if somebody asks "how can I unsubscribe from ...", "My book don't show up, help!", etc., Turkers are forbidden to answer that. Turkers found that out after they were banned from answering NowNow-questions. After a while Amazon came up with the so called "boilerplate"-answer that should be used instead of an own answer to point the Kindle-user to the Customer Support. This boilerplate-answer very often leads to a "Junk"-answer which lead to the withdrawal of the payment and a "vote" for "bad-answers". If you have enough bad votes you might get banned from the system.
- To increase the quality of the answers for NowNow and Kindle a so called qualification has been established ("Authoraized Kindle Answerer"). How this qualification can be received and when it get lost nobody knew but it often happened that people where losing this qualification while answering questions.
- The interface allowing you to answer questions is not very good. You are presented a question and if you want to answer it you have to enter a captcha (for every answer a new one) and answer the question. If you can't answer the question, you can skip it but you can't set it to be ignored in the future. The questions are shown by random and kept active for quite some time (at least a month). So with just being able to skip questions, you see the same questions (e.g. about the length of certain parts of whales) over and over again without being able to actually only get new ones. So as somebody answering questions you click the skip-button for a couple of minutes until you see a question that you can answer, enter the captcha (hoping that it is correct, otherwise you will get an error and a different question) and finally the answer.

So summing up all these points I come up with the following theory:

People answering Kindle-questions are in steady danger of being banned by Amazon because they answered quesitons that Amazon regards as Kindle-related (what the criterias are, nobody knows). As well, if you want to participate at the weekly contest, Kindle-questions are not very lucrative; the same amount of work can bring you 10-times more votes when being invested into the research of Askville-questions instead of Kindle-questions. Because of these two factors, the number of people actually taking the risk answering these questions was dropping significantly, so Amazon raised the payment from $0.03 (as it was in the beginning) to $0.25.

This worked for a while the usual way, i.e. people started doing Kindle-answers, some of them get banned for (as they claim) no obvious reasons, etc. Then came the day when this feature was advertized by Ophra. Thousands of people started asking questions, most of these questions were just for testing but because of the shitty interface at Mturk lead to a huge backlog of unanswered questions where serious questions were lost quickly. The presidential election was leading to even more questions ("when do they close the poll in CA", etc.) that landed in the backlog again and were still coming up until last week when the service was shut down.

So we had a situation here:

- A backlog of about 1200 questions most of them fun-questions impossible to answer or outdated because of the end of the presidential election
- Not very much people actually taking the risk of answering Kindle-questions

These two factors lead to the effect that more and more questions became unanswered for a long time making more and more Kindle-users unhappy. One solution would have been to remove all fun- and outdated questions (e.g. by using an "autoresponder" telling the user) and/or enhance the interface on MTurk to allow the answerer to remove questions permanently from his/her list of questions (there was one way by accepting and then returning the question but that also increased one of his/her negative internal counters). Both of these things would have meant work to be done by people working at Amazon and the past showed already that this is avoided at all costs. So the next best thing was done, shutting down Kindle/NowNow with the other positive effect that Amazon saves some money every month.

So in my eyes the answer of Amazon you received is not correct. Not the lack of interest of customers but the contrary led to that decision. Too many people were using a service that was not able to cope with that due to stupid decisions being made by Amazon in the past.


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## spamgirl (Nov 5, 2008)

cerberus said:


> At least you got a response. As somebody who is also answering questions at MTurk, I can tell you that this is a big exception that you...


A few problems

- I answered Kindle questions with the correct answer, NOT the boilerplate, and was never banned
- NowNow was already in the death throes when the Oprah episode aired, the backlog was just the straw on the camel's back
- As to "not many people taking the risk of doing NowNow questions", they were being dumped 5 per minute, or 15 answers per minute, in the last 3 days the service was up... figuring most questions took 3 minutes on average, that's 45 people working at a time - which isn't bad knowing the overall number of Turkers is very, very low
- NowNow has always concentrated their efforts into Askville, and has put little work into NowNow for either mobile or Kindle. The fact is Askville, somehow, is making Amazon/NowNow money, while the Kindle and mobile versions were not. THAT is why they were shut down.
- It was definitely not shut down for lack of interest, though.

FWIW, mTurk staff had no idea what was going on, leading me to believe neither did Amazon (as Amazon and NowNow are two separate entities.)


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## cerberus (Nov 24, 2008)

spamgirl said:


> A few problems
> 
> - I answered Kindle questions with the correct answer, NOT the boilerplate, and was never banned


I was doing it in the "you are wrong here and might contact Customer Support but here is my opinion what might be solution but don't blame me or Amazon if it was wrong"-way. Never got a junk-vote and sometimes even a "Great".



spamgirl said:


> - NowNow was already in the death throes when the Oprah episode aired, the backlog was just the straw on the camel's back
> - As to "not many people taking the risk of doing NowNow questions", they were being dumped 5 per minute, or 15 answers per minute, in the last 3 days the service was up... figuring most questions took 3 minutes on average, that's 45 people working at a time - which isn't bad knowing the overall number of Turkers is very, very low


Maybe it's the different timezone but when I was working on Kindle-questions the counter never dropped (except when I answered a question) but increased by a rate of ca. 100 questions per day. This changed the last days of last week before the shutdown but that might be because no new questions were accepted anymore by NowNow and open questions where autoresponded/autoclosed by NowNow leading to the decrease of the "open questions"-counter.



spamgirl said:


> - NowNow has always concentrated their efforts into Askville, and has put little work into NowNow for either mobile or Kindle. The fact is Askville, somehow, is making Amazon/NowNow money, while the Kindle and mobile versions were not. THAT is why they were shut down.


Not very surprising. With the additional "quest-coins" you receive if you add a product-link of Amazon and somebody actually buying something through that link, Amazon directly benefits from this system. This is a feature not available via the MTurk-interface, but I'm sure that many of the "cheap place to buy a back-scratcher from south-timbuktu"-like questions will be answered with links to Amazon-product-pages just out of lazyness instead of actually looking for a cheap place.



spamgirl said:


> - It was definitely not shut down for lack of interest, though.


At least something we both agree on ;-)



spamgirl said:


> FWIW, mTurk staff had no idea what was going on, leading me to believe neither did Amazon (as Amazon and NowNow are two separate entities.)


Especially for the Kindle-questions I don't think that you can see the two companies separated and I doubt that the initiative adding the NowNow-feature to the Kindle was coming from NowNow.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Well, I never used it, but it sounds like it was a good idea that wasn't well implemented.  Maybe they just didn't realize how popular it would be and had no way to sort questions according to urgency or importance.  

I am ambivalent as to its demise.

Ann


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## Wannabe (Nov 6, 2008)

Vampyre said:


> No NowNow now? Nooo! Um what was that?


This is me laughing out loud.


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## Wannabe (Nov 6, 2008)

Vampyre said:


> Now NowNow is now NotNow? Bummer


Still laughing.


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## Wannabe (Nov 6, 2008)

Vampyre said:


> That's it don't complain to Amazon, complain to Oprah. She will fix 'em!


Yeah, and maybe she'd pay to keep the service going.


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