April 20, 2011

via Techcrunch.com

It looks like although Yahoo is shutting many of its services down, the company is still trying to innovate around new products. Spawned in Yahoo’s Sandbox, Yahoo 4Cast is a platform for you to cast your prediction or ‘foresight’ on any topics.

According to the description of the product, When you log in to 4Cast from your Yahoo! account, you’ll see a list of challenges. From this page, you can cast your prediction on just about any topic, from the stock market, to celebrity fashion. You can also respond to other users’ forecasts and follow your favorite users.

So it looks like the idea behind 4Cast is to allows users to share the opinions and predictions on topis like sports, finance, politics and celebrity news, and compare these with other users predictions. User can issue “challenges,” to elicit feedback from fellow users (i.e. Will Sarah Palin announce her 2012 presidential bid decision by end of May?). You can agree or disagree with the challenge poser and win points on a leaderboard by predicting what will actually happen. And the site appears to also want to be a discussion portal as well.

It seems to be similar to Yahoo Answers, but with a gaming mechanic attached. What do you think? Does 4Cast have the legs to be an independent product or feature? Or will it be quietly retired?