My Stack Overfloweth
Early this morning (I was up at 4am to watch the Olympic opening ceremonies), I received an invitation to the beta of Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for computer programmers.
Since that time, I've already amassed a total of 95 nondenominated points and five "badges" (one, just for filling in my personal info). All that for asking four questions and jotting ten answers.
I've been awaiting this site for some time now. Founded by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software, Stack Overflow is akin to sites like expertsexchange but without the double-entendre domain name, hideous appearance, and annoying registration hurdles. (Block the "experts" from your Google search results with Greasemonkey and the Google Filter.)
The content seems a little Windows-centric thus far, but I asked a Linux question (and then provided my own answer -- more points!) and got some reponses from folks that clearly know their way around a bash prompt.
From the looks of the site -- and the fact that I was invited -- I'd say that it'll be ready to go public pretty soon. At first, I suspect it'll be a good place to find answers since the point whores will be out in force trying to reach #1. After that, it'll depend on the same type of prolific and tireless contributors that make Wikipedia so darned useful.
Archived Comments
I've been looking forward to the launch of Stack Overflow ever since Jeff announced the project on his blog. Being forced to wade through the mess that is Experts Exchange is not something I ever look forward to; hopefully their new site is a big step up.
It's pretty cool. There's still some work to be done to help you track your participation in questioning and answering to follow the discussion. They're using uservoice.com to manage feature requests and there have been many requests for that sort of tracking (plus RSS and Twitter for following posts).