Formspring forges out of awkward adolescence

From CNET News.com: It's been a volatile year for Formspring, a question-and-answer service that saw lightning-fast growth in the wake of its November 2009 launch but also controversy and scorn as it was criticized for harboring high levels of spam and nasty anonymous bullying. Slightly over a year later, it was unclear whether Formspring would be able to turn this traffic and interest into something positive, sustainable, and eventually profitable.

The company, predictably, says that it can. On Tuesday night, Formspring made a set of announcements that collectively spell out a desire to grow up: the company has raised $11.5 million in a Series A venture round. And it's launched an ambitious new feature, the "Respond" button, which lets site owners use Formspring to solicit input or answers from their audiences as a more distributed sort of take on Internet commenting.

With the Respond button, which anyone with a Web site will be able to embed, Formspring users can post their reactions and responses to their own Formspring pages and other social networks where they can be syndicated. They will in turn link back to the site or publication that originally posted the question or request for responses. The goal, founder and CEO Ade Olonoh says, is to "reach a broader audience and extend the Formspring experience."

At launch, a number of partner sites like AskMen.com, The Huffington Post, and IGN, have already integrated the Formspring Respond button. Like the Facebook "like" button--which seems to have been an inspiration to Formspring--it's free to install.

Responses aren't aggregated on a participating publisher's site, nor does the publisher have any privileges to moderate them--they're the property of the Formspring user answering the question. That's in line with Formspring's existence as a distributed network of inquiries and reaction. Unlike Quora, another question-and-answer site that's been generating plenty of chatter in Silicon Valley, it doesn't aim to create a searchable trove of questions and answers; Formspring is distributed rather than centralized. Until the introduction of the Respond button, users could only ask questions directly to other individual users.

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