Fixya and the Problem With Self-help Sites

Got an email from new Web site Fixya, which bills itself as a Web 2.0-style tech support site. It's basically a broad-based bulletin board. Users post questions, and other users -- deemed "experts" -- post solutions. Fixya claims to have posts on over 700,000 products, so instead of searching Google to solve that problem of Vista not talking to your Treo, you might go directly to Fixya and hope you find an answer.

But there's always been a problem with self-help sites. I remember thinking this when I first heard about eHow in the 1990s from one its backers, Ann Winblad. No single self-help site can ever assemble enough answers to enough questions to ensure you'll always find what you need. So after you try eHow or Fixya or any site a couple times and don't get a useful answer, you turn back to Googling the wide Web and never return to the self-help site.

So far, no self-help site has ever reached critical mass. The closest might be TripAdvisor, though I'm not even sure that's a self-help site. I wonder if it will ever be possible for a Fixya type site to really take off as a stand-alone entity.

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