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MSN QnA Beta Is Closing On May 21st

May 11, 2009 8:28 pm by Sunshine | 4 comments

All things come to an end, same goes for the QnA beta. The team just announced the end of the beta and the closing of the QnA site:

We are ending the QnA beta test and are closing the QnA site on May 21, 2009.
First and foremost, we want to thank you for your participation. Since we introduced QnA, we’ve learned a lot about this new way of communicating and creating valuable content. At this time, we are closing the QnA site, but the experience of running QnA and gathering all of the great feedback you’ve shared with us will certainly influence future product direction.
When QnA moved from the Live Search organization into MSN we announced that we’d be looking for new ways to share questions and answers across MSN and provide new opportunities for you to engage with each other and share your opinions, ideas, and knowledge. That mission has not changed. Questions and answers are still important to MSN and your feedback has been very valuable for our future product strategy. You’ll see more ways of how MSN will empower people to connect and communicate over the coming months.
QnA has been a wonderful opportunity for us to learn from you, and closing the site is a sad occasion for those of us who worked hard to create this site and build this community. Again, we thank all of our wonderful contributors for your participation. It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to be a part of the community that we all created together. See you on MSN!
-QnA Team

In their blog post you can find information on how to stay in touch with your QnA friends. Furthermore they point out that you can ask questions, get answers, and have discussions on a variety of topics in the message boards throughout MSN; Airfares & Travel, Autos, City Guides, Games, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Money, Movies, Music, Real Estate, Tech & Gadgets and TV. You can do so with the same account you used for the QnA message boards. Windows 7 Beta and RC users can now ask their questions on Microsoft Answers.

Previous articles about QnA

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http://www.liveside.net/members/BuciboLebo/default.aspx BuciboLebo
Sadly so. Qna was quite an experience. It could probably not be monetized by itself but it did a lot to add to building a Windows Live community which I was part of.
http://msftandthefuture.spaces.live.com/ Quikboy
The final straw was moving it over to MSN. I know it was a beta, but a lot of people that use the betas hope it will continue to exist (such as Microsoft Max) but obviously the team is keeping hush hush about how the QnA experience will improve anything.
QnA did have potential when it was on Live, it just needed ads to keep it afloat. In this recession, it was bound to die away without some type of money-making.
http://msftandthefuture.spaces.live.com/ Quikboy
I’m also surprised they’re going to even ‘bother’ making MSN City Guides into a place that probably very view people will ever truly use.
The first straw happened with killing off the City Search partner (which brought a LOT of data to the site)
The 2nd straw was updating the site for ONLY relatively a few new events happening, and a bunch of stupid articles about places to visit in cities around the U.S. (I want info. about my city!). No new sites designs or features for over a year.
So now they’re paying attention to that? QnA has more potential than a silly city guides site where there’s already much more professional sites and sources to get that info. (like a local news site, Facebook, specialty sites, etc.) or a community question and answer type site, where only Yahoo! has managed to grasp it somewhat right.
These decisions always make me shake my head at MS.
http://www.liveside.net/members/Jamie/default.aspx Jamie
I agree with the quikboy Its madness that MS thinks City Guides has more potential than QNA as there is no reason i would use it (city guides) and there is far better sources that a web search can find if you wanted to know about many more places and its worldwide.
But at least Yahoo Answers i believe doing something right as it is the direction QNA was hopefully going and both far better than MSN Boards