Questions, requests, and bookmarks: Otavo did them all.

Otavo is a service based in Ontario, Canada that is starting its public beta today. We posted an article about them back in April, and now the service has gone public and it looks pretty good. Otavo users can ask and answer questions, organize and comment on bookmarks, and share goals with a social context. Think del.icio.us+ask.metafilter+43Things all bundled into one friendly user interface with voting and rewards for the most active users thrown in. Very cool.

The company's founder Amanuel Tewold told me that the name Otavo has a double meaning. It is an acronym for Organizing Text, Audio and Video Objects. It is also a word in Esperanto that means Ottawa, where the company was founded.

After creating a profile you can create "requests" using a well designed Java script bookmarklet or link all of your URLs to requests you have already created. You can also start making requests and asking questions right from the home page. Everyone can comment on your requests and they can add your requests to their profiles too. Profiles come with blogs and include social networking functionality like being able to send messages to your friends.

"Floster" (the silly name for "float poster") is a nice dynamic web app that embeds into your bookmark page so that when you click back, it automatically grabs text without losing your bookmarklet in the browser shuffle. Otavo thinks that AdSense will be very contextual when placed alongside user requests, questions and bookmarks. That makes sense to me. They are also considering offering their technology as a white label solution to appropriate institutions like libraries and universities. Tewold told me that the reason for the delay from April until now was mainly to develop the user interface, which looks successful. This kind of system will feel very comfortable to non-technical users who want to socially bookmark, share goals and otherwise organize information. Rewards are given out for a variety of activities, with the highest rewards coming from referring new users and adding new requests. The most active users will get rewarded and other users will be enticed by the rewards to join in. Very cool, and something that they didn't even think of when they started. It's an appealing alternative to sharing ad revenue but the company sees the main way to drive participation as being through the site's structure.

Although you can do almost all of the site's functionality elsewhere, Otavo executes on it very well. There are certainly plenty of social bookmarking, question answering and goal setting sites around the web (hey!), but bundling all of these services together and doing them well is still impressive. Yahoo! could and probably should bundle Yahoo!Answers, del.icio.us and Yahoo!360 together, but they haven't yet. There are lots of new social search engines coming down the pike online, but calling Otavo social search would be selling it short. There's a lot more going on here, and we'll watch with interest how they build out the user base and scale up.

Original address: Questions, Quests and Bookmarks: Otavo does it allAuthor: Marshall Kirkpatrick