LinkedIn Has The Answers

I just found out about LinkedIn Answers, LinkedIn's most recent offering. The concept is simple, but like LinkedIn, powerful. People post questions (much like Ask Yahoo!), and you can reply to them, by recommending an expert from your network (pushing out business in the direction of your contacts) or replying yourself (offering your strenghts and knowledge to the person presenting the question).

What I like about the concept the most is how it really takes the network to the next level, by making people's expertise available in a non-consulting setting, getting (many) expert answers to questions very quickly, at no cost to you. Granted that this may easily become a service for which LinkedIn begins charging (brokering quick and dirty consulting bits), I am not sure if getting a cut off of these exchanges would be beneficial to LinkedIn. In any case, it just made the site more valuable and useful to me than it already was.

While we are on the LinkedIn topic, and in case you missed my comment on the business-centric social network, here is an excellent article recently published on Business 2.0 about them. Where are those LinkedIn members reading this post? Anything to share about your experience? How does LinkedIn Answers feel to you?