Yahoo 4Cast - predict anything

Yahoo! 4Cast lets you predict anything, but can it predict its own future?

Although Yahoo is closing some of its services, it came out recently with a new service that would be interesting to analytics people.

Yahoo! 4Cast lets you show others what you know on topics like finance, news and entertainment. You can test your ability to forecast the future, share your opinions and find out what others think.

Some of the popular challenges include

Who will win "American Idol" season 10 (US)?
Will Sarah Palin announce her 2012 presidential bid decision by end of May
Who will win the Stanley Cup?

It looks like Yahoo is also trying to jump on the competitions platform. Crowd-sourcing predictions in entertainment, politics and other "soft" fields was the goal of Predictify, which went out of business in 2009.

The competition platforms that seem to be successful focus on more technical fields which require more expertise, such as

a self-driving car ( DARPA Grand Challenge )
Space flight ( X-Prize)
medical and biological challenges (innocentive)
or analytics and data mining (TunedIT, Kaggle).