When my anti-Twitter friend finally joined the service, I expected that it would only take a few days for him to see why we love it. But after a week, he’d already deleted his account, saying it simply wasn’t for him. So I inquired further, and asked him if he’d been tweeting.

Nah, not really, he said. Well, what about responding to others’ tweets? Nah, not really, he said.

Well, duh. That’s the problem. You gotta engage, I told him. And now, a year later, his incessant Twitter use is borderline annoying. It’s all about engagement.

And what better way to utilize the Twitter platform than to engage with strangers by helping them answer their questions. I’m sure you’ve seen some Twitter users use the service as if it were a polling forum, or even Google. So many questions floating around on the Twittersphere – why not take some time and answer some of them?

That’s the thought behind Youasked.it, a new single-serving site that allows you to respond to random people’s questions on Twitter, in real time. A random question will be generated for you, and you then have 30 seconds to respond. If you don’t want to answer the given question, you can skip it and get a different one. You can also narrow down the type of questions you’re likely to receive by telling Youasked.it what string of keywords the tweeted questions must contain.

Yes, you do have to be logged in to your Twitter account to participate – you can’t just send totally anonymous responses to people. But if you’re looking for a funny (and possible conflict-inducing) way to engage with people on Twitter that you may have never had the chance to engage otherwise, this is a pretty interesting little concept.

Feel like trolling the Twittersphere? This tool makes it easy.

[Youasked.it via Maarten Schenk via reddit]