text: why would yahoo spend so much time and programming resources to build yahoo answers? it's just a web forum...   it's a lot more friendly than the typical web forums. the design is more intuitive, and it is more graphically driven than most others are.  plus, it's a great push towards their portal strategy. first, there was just email and im. then there were groups -- not a significant step above the alt.net groups, but with a different format. now there's yahoo 360 -- you can blog here as well. and, with answers...maybe you'll spend all of your time here, which means they get more traffic, which means the advertisers pay more money...