An unexpected move from LinkedIn: they've launched LinkedIn Answers today, a service similar to Yahoo Answers that lets you ask questions to members of your network.
You enter your question, pick the members of your network who are likely to know the answer and receive answers from your connections, their connections, and experts who use LinkedIn - presumably LinkedIn emails these members, which could increase yet again the high volume of mail received from LinkedIn. You can browse the questions by category and gain expertise points every time the question asker picks your answer as the best one. The top experts then appear in a ranked list. Unsurprisingly, most of the questions are currently about finding referrals and connections.
It's interesting that LinkedIn is launching the new service straight after the closing down of Google Answers due to poor performance. It's also their second new launch in recent months: they launched a Yellow Pages-like Services Directory in October. The Q&A service seems like a worthwhile experiment: if successful, it could increase activity on the site. If not, it was probably a trivial feature to build.
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