Techcrunch has posted an article examing the implications of the closing of Google Answers and the concurrent success of Yahoo’s similar service…

Link: Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Yahoo’s Big Win.

This wasn’t a war, it was a massacre, and a case study in why all this “Web 2.0 stuff” actually has legs when applied properly. Google went for a direct revenue stream, a business model that made sense in 2002. Yahoo, launching much later, launched a free product and used the ideals of community participation to remove friction from the process and get out of the way of users. This incentivized use and has created a massive number of page views that Yahoo is now monetizing. The network effect kicked in big time.

It’s worth think about this a bit. Even Google makes a mis-step every now and then by not really trusting what is their apparent core value – that the network is radically changing how computers and people work and share information. And more importantly Yahoo’s model seems to have demonstrated that the Web 2.0 model of cooperative computing is something that is more than just “the meme of the moment.”