sark

If you want your app to run on majority of cell phones out there J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) is currently your best bet. It may not be as feature rich as IPhone SDK or Google Android but it is probably the most ubiquitous platform for cell phones today. You can download a free WTK (Wireless Tool Kit) from java.sun.com and there are good tutorials on the same site for J2ME beginers.

One thing to remember is if you make use of any of the even a little bit fancy functionality of the cell phone through J2ME (SMS send/receive, Phone book integration or location based services) your app probably won't work on real handset outside the emulator - at least in US. All cell phone carriers here are control freaks and they have turned off all those permissions for any "not officially blessed" third party app. This is the main reason for the lack of any worthwhile mobile applications in the first place!

true, many great people worked hard throughout their lives and still never achieved success in their lifetime. But on the other hand I can't think of a single great personality who made it WITHOUT real hardwork.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, I definitely intend do give some sort of "Browse" navigation in future - maybe with a tag cloud? It's currently not on the site because I have not much content right now as I just launched it a few days ago. If I had top categories they will all be empty :) I will put them on once I have some sizable content.

Kinda chicken-and-egg problem :)

BTW you can see it (kinda) in action at http://askurpals.com/topic/10

Thanks for your feedback.

Other people on your email may also be interested in the answers you get - may be now or in future. It happens all the time on the mailing list I use. People request others to consolidated answers they has received for the questions they asked in past. That's what gave me this idea. This way they get to see them easily at one place without any extra effort of manually consolidating every now and then. I hope overtime it will build into a community knowledge base of common questions and answers.

Thanks for your feedback. To answer your questions,

1. Benefit for the person asking the question: The person gets answer from the people he knows. When I needed CPA to file my taxes this year I found myself sending email to my office colleagues although there are many CPA reviews available on web. May be it's just me but sometimes suggestions from the people you know matter more than generic review site.

2. Benefit for the people who answer: These are people who are friends with the person asking the question. If they see email in their Inbox from a friend asking a specific question I think at least few of them will help.

At least that's what I think :)

I did think about providing the email interface. The only reason I ended up not implementing it was because I was afraid people would not be comfortable sharing their email ids with a new site. Plus, many people have auto email signatures (especially for office email account) that are appended automatically at the end of the email message. Sometimes these signatures contain personally identifiable information like title, extension number etc. I did not want this information accidentally disclosed on the site. I found these auto email signatures very difficult to parse out reliably across different formats and systems.

Thanks for your suggestion. I'm not too worried about monetization right now. Do you mean I should create some sort of Facebook widget to link to my site or just try to get the word out on the facebook?