I was cruising around the Google Developer area and I stumbled across Google Helpouts. A service being billed as “Experts with Answers, Meet Developers with Questions”. Seems like a more one-to-one version of Stack Overflow, where you can get the answers you are looking for when it comes to development on the Google platform, but in a more direct, one-to-one way.
Inversely, you can contribute your developer skills, and be one of the knowledgeable developers who are giving back to the developer community. The Google Helpouts page describes it as: Give Back - Continue Learning - Build Your Reputation. I signed up for an account, gave my profile, but the tags that I was able to connect with my profile really didn’t match my skills. It seems very programming language, and platform focused at this point--not really for APIs.
At first glance I thought Google Helpouts was more about Google APIs, available as an exentsion of the Google Developer program, but it seems to be a more tech focused, skills matching service. I think the same concept would work well, if applied to APIs, but I don’t see any reason for a new platform, just build it on top of Stack Overflow API—why re-invent the wheel?
