We're proud to announce that we've just launched a version of ZotFish as a Facebook application, which lets you browse and vote on ZotFish questions from directly within Facebook. You can see it and install it at http://apps.facebook.com/zotfish.

We've taken full advantage of integration with the Facebook platform, so that you can:

• Display the most recent question you've asked, and voted up, on your profile page

• Publish questions you've asked to your newsfeed, so your friends can see them and help vote them up

• Vote on questions directly from within Facebook (as well as browsing them generally), without going to the ZotFish site

• Vote using your Facebook account, without going through the ZotFish registration process

We're very excited about the "viral" possibilities of people being able to see each others' questions on Facebook, vote them up directly, and be able to add ZotFish to their own profile. This is just one more step in our building up the question base to discover the questions you most want answered.

-- Michael

Back when I was in college, we had a film club on campus that showed different films every week -- which was great since the town didn't have a real cinema.

One day they organized a special event -- a screening of Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," and by some propitious alignment of the stars they'd managed to get Oliver Stone himself to be present and answer questions for an hour afterward.

It was my freshman year, and the first time I'd ever been in the same room with somebody "famous." I remember a student asking Stone about a bird that appeared halfway through the movie, if it symbolized anything, and if so, what. And Stone explained it exactly. (Too bad, years later, I can't remember what he said...)

But I just couldn't get over the fact that somebody had just asked a director a direct question about his art, and gotten a direct answer in return.

This is the same kind of experience we want ZotFish to provide. For everyone to be able to ask their questions about films, songs, and books of the very people who created them. To create an ongoing conversation between those who film, sing and write, and those who watch, listen and read. And to make the world of art and entertainment a bit richer for everyone.

On the very first day of our launch, we received a great review from Alana Taylor of Mashable:

"None of the question-and-answer sites that exist seek the participation of celebrities, politicians, and other famous people so actively... Not only does it sound fast and easy, but as long as there's participation, like Digg, there's no reason why it shouldn't work."

Mashable is the Internet's top social networking news site, and no one has more experience in covering Web 2.0 stories. It's great to get such a positive review from them.

Read the whole thing at http://mashable.com/2008/05/30/zotfish/.

-- Michael