Amazon officially released this morning its Yahoo! Answers competitor, Askville.com. The site, quietly launched in beta in December 2006, takes a game show approach, rewarding smarty pants with points and temporarily Amazon gift cards.

Google canceled its Pay-For-Answers service in late 2006 and Yahoo! Answers has clearly emerged as the leader for specialty sites that focus on bringing inquisitive minds and seekers of knowledge together. Personally I just find it a lot easier to enter a question into Google and run with that.

Rewarding experts with hard cash (in the form of gift cards) is a great incentive, but this is set to expire at the end of 2007. They’re going to have to extend this if they really want to grab some attention. The problem is are they going to have any meaningful traffic to monetize it via Amazon Ads?

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