What People Don't Understand About Qassia

Qassia claims to be an intelligence engine. The purpose of Qassia is to collect personal information about people, companies and places, known as intel. For each spicy piece a user shares, Qassia lets the writer designate a web site that is sponsoring that intel. That web site receives a quality backlink from Qassia, which increases the sponsored site's page rank.

In order to have intel be accepted, it needs to go through a screening process where at least ten other users rate the information before it can be published.

Many of the users do not understand what intel Qassia wants. Reading the definitions that Qassia provides on the explanation of intel page makes it seem that Qassia wants to create a gossip database about everyday people and things. One of Qassia's examples about premier intel is listing "the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Julie Hendrikson, former girlfriend." Other examples include listing a boss's hobbies, the musical preferences of a colleague or business activities performed by a neighbor. Besides intel about people, Qassia requests intel about companies, such as writing about "what the cafeteria serves at McNally MetalWorks on Thursdays." Qassia is trying to be the leader of unique and obscure information that is provided by humans.

The problem is, not all users understand this principle. The screening process allows screeners to provide feedback on why they felt a particular piece of intel deserved a certain ranking.

This feedback can contain many mixed signals to the writer. Some screeners will praise the intel's brevity, while others will complain that the piece of information is not long enough. It does not take 500 words to state that someone likes card games or gardening, and if a writer were able to conjure up so many words, surely there would be criticism on it being too long or pointless. Intel like mentioning someone's fondness of card games is regarded as useless by some screeners, who in turn give the piece a very low rating. True, most people are not interested in someone's hobbies or "the quirks and idiosyncrasies of Julie Hendrikson, former girlfriend," but that is still the information that Qassia is trying to collect. Other screeners give harsh, low scores based on the topic of the intel or how it is written. Writers that choose to write for search engine optimization instead of going for poetic prose get penalized. When writing about a product, whether it is a good or bad review, screeners seem to love to accuse the writer of creating blatant advertising.

Qassia is currently in closed beta and seems like a fantastic opportunity to share quirky information while being rewarded with a higher page rank for a personal web site, just as long as the users would stop trying to turn Qassia into a boring collection of grammatically correct articles of at least 500 words on how to be an Ebay powerseller.