Ideas

I like the instant ability to get help. How would you handle the payment system? How is the revenue generated? Do we take a portion of the payment?

It would also be really important to create a means of knowing which people are actually online. It would be terribly annoying to have to add a bunch of people to get the "instant" help. I'd want to know they are online and will be online for a certain period before I added them to my messenger.

I've had a similar idea floating around in my head. Friends, relatives, and friends of relatives are always asking me questions about how to fix their PC. I'm not much of a Windows guy so I'm usually not much help but the point is that I get inquiries fairly regularly.

I'm not sure how much people would be willing to pay to have problems fixed however.

Another idea is to add a downloadable maintenance package that allows trusted administrators to get on a machine and help diagnose problems. I'm a unix guy so I immediately think Cygwin but the windows remote desktop might be a better solution.

Advertising this solution would probably be the major investment but CH seems good at marketing.

Are there any other online solutions like this?

Response to comments so far: Knowing when people are online is already done in messenger, skype and so on. Basically anyone logged in and active would get a ping that someone is asking for help. Those logged in and inactive could as well, depending on their preferences. The person asking for help would see "there are 50 people logged in who could help and another 100 users that are logged in and inactive who may respond"

Payment could be via paypal or on account, such as $5 a month for unlimited use. There's different options here. Consider it like a premium phone line for support but much less expensive. Thanks for the comments!

More thoughts on this, I thought maybe preloading your account from paypal would be best - like Skype. That way there's no delay if you need an instant answer, it just deducts the amount from your credit.

i like the idea. i could see having a service running on my machine at work that would float up questions and if i think i know the answer i would bid on it.

great idea, maybe applied to many languages

Two points

1. People can participate by answering questions and building up thier ranking and revenue. Example - People from developing countries would be more interested if they can participate without upfront payment.

2. Without a large user base, it will be difficult to attract people. So you have to develop sufficiently large number of people who first provide answers.

3. As Seth Godwin says, making people aware of this service is the most difficult part.

Note:Google tried the same and failed.

what i would do:

1. definitely a plug in ... nobody wants a new app installed just like that... before it is really helping him (and everybody has doubts at first). But not just for messenger, think ie, firefox... etc. Integration is the key.

2. charge for use, that's how i'd go. One question a day or week free, extra will be charged. Also could be charged monthly for unlimited questions.

3. must do something for the ones who answer too... should be paid on ratings. Suppose you start with a rating of 1, when you reach 5 you get a sum of money for each question.

The technical aspect of the project I'm sure it's pretty straightforward to handle. I'm talking dev, not hardware.

Can be done. worth doing. 5 stars from me.

Isn't most of this already being done via irc chats?

I think you'll have to be very careful about devising and implementing a pricing scheme. Sites like Amazon's MTurk prove that people will pay for help, but they'll pay as little as they can get away with. If you want to attract skilled helpers you'll need to make it worth their while.

As for rating, I think an ebay-style feedback system would be the fairest way. Perhaps with different categories such as 'technical ability', 'speed of response', 'politeness/helpfulness', etc? The right person to help a professional debug a piece of database code to a deadline will not necessarily be the right person to help my gran remember how to access her email for the sixteenth time this week!

The problem is that text and even voice support is limiting. A lot of people can't use their machines at all due to some problem. My suggestion looks at this problem to avoid any system type or funtionality limitation.

Look for it at my account "torgrot".

Best
Torgrot