Ask.com parent company InterActiveCorp is preparing to launch a new how-to site under the name Life123. The site is live right now in a pre-beta or "alpha" launch mode. IAC has yet to formally announce or promote Life123, but the executive in charge of its development took some time to give me a sneak peek.
IAC it has no specific date set for its launch. But once Life123 does go "live," it will be up against a growing crowd of expert, how-to, and community-driven content sites that may provide some fierce competition.
The format of Life123 is closest to About.com, with "guides" on subjects ranging from health and beauty to technology and travel. However, unlike About, Life123 combines staff-generated content with user-submitted articles and videos.
"We attack each topic in two ways," says Ben Joslin, senior vice president and general manager of Life123.com. "We write what we think is a nice editorialized article on a given topic, and then we present the users two versions: 'keep it brief' and 'learn more.'" It's up to the reader to decide how much time they want to invest in a topic, Joslin says.
Stealing a page from the playbook of community-driven sites such as Squidoo and Google's Knol, Life123 is also allowing its users to register with the site and earn money by contributing content.
Life, as Easy as 1, 2, 3..
Life123 promotes itself as an alternative to the hard-to-navigate world of search engines, saying the site does "the hard work of finding for you."
In my review of the site, it did a pretty good job at fulfilling that promise. On the one hand, Life123's range of material is limited compared to what you might find at a search engine. But do you really need 100,000 search results when looking for one good lasagna recipe?
When it comes to how-to content within its categories, Life123 has a fairly wide range of material already available to supplement the Life123 guides' contributions. Life123 pulls applicable content from a handful of other IAC properties -- RealEstate.com, LendingTree, and Match.com. It has also partnered up with sites external to the company, such as Eating Well Magazine and Parenthood.com.
My search for "lasagna," for example, led me to an article about the "art of cooking pasta" -- which, in turn, presents a video, a quick list of mistakes to avoid, and a handful of other related articles.
I found the interface clean and easy to navigate. Defined content buckets made it easy to drill down and find what I was looking for and then some.
But finding and delivering a lasagna recipe is one thing. The real question is can Life123 find success as it joins an already crowded how-to market -- packed with both veteran sites such as WikiHow and industry newcomers such as FindHow?
Life123's depth of quality content is certainly a competitive advantage. As a failsafe, and a nod to IAC's Ask.com, if you can't find what you're looking for at Life123 you can always ask Jeeves - thanks to an integrated Ask.com search function.
