Understanding Mobile Q&A Usage: An Exploratory Study

Recently Questioning and Answering (Q&A) communities that facilitate knowledge sharing among people have been introduced to the mobile environments such as Naver Mobile Q&A and ChaCha. These mobile Q&A services are very different from traditional Q&A sites in that questions/answers are short in length and are exchanged via mobile devices (e.g., SMS or mobile Internet). While traditional Q&A sites have been well investigated, so far little is known about the mobile Q&A usage. To understand mobile Q&A usage, the authors analyzed 2.4 million question/answer pairs spanning a 14 month period from Naver Mobile Q&A and performed a complementary survey study of 555 active mobile Q&A users.