Using stranger as sensors: Temporal and geo-sensitive question answering via social media

MoboQ is a location-based real-time social question answering service deployed in the field in China. Using MoboQ, people can ask temporal and geo-sensitive questions, such as how long is the line at a popular business right now, and then receive answers that crowdsourced from other users in a timely fashion. To obtain answers for questions, the system analyzes the live stream from public microblogging service Sina Weibo to identify people who are likely to currently be at the place that is associated with a question and sends them the unsolicited question through the microblogging service from which they were identified. MoboQ was deployed in China at the beginning of 2012, until October of the same year, it was used to ask 15,224 questions by 35,214 registered users, and it gathered 29,491 answers; 74.6% of the questions received at least one answer, 28% received a first response within 10 minutes, and 51% of the questions got first answer within 20 minutes. In total, 91% of the questions successfully found at least one answer candidate, and they were sent to 162,954 microblogging service users. We analyze the usage patterns and behaviors of the real-world end-users, discuss the lessons learned, and outline the future directions and possible applications that could be built on top of MoboQ. Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).