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Quora Gamifies: Credits And “Ask To Answer” Suggestions Live For Everyone | TechCrunch
After five months of beta testing, Quora has made its Quora Credits and “Ask to Answer” User Suggestions live for everyone today. All users can now earn credits for a variety of positive and user engagement-magnifying Quora behaviors like answering questions they’ve been asked to answer, getting votes on answers to questions they’ve solicited through “Ask to Answer” and getting votes on their answers to other questions. Users can also give each other credits, which is awesome and can be managed through the Credit interface here. This is all fine and good, but what exactly does Quora expect you to spend credits on? Especially since you can’t cash them in? Well Quora expects you to “pay” important people to answer your questions obviously.
Quora Opens Doors to Self Promoters, Bias and Marketeers
Quora's differentiation from more established but less respected question and answer forums has typically centered around the quality of the discussions and those participating. It's not too infrequent that one finds the perfect person situated to answer a question pops up in Quora to take on challenging queries, from how companies started, to strategy and history. But as the site's grown in visibility, attracting more a wider swatch of early adopters, including social media marketers, there has been something of a tug of war between those looking to keep the site pristine, lacking self-promotion, and those who are hoping to leverage the site as yet another outlet for branding and positioning.
Quora has taken the tech and entrepreneurial world by storm, providing a system that works so fluidly that it is sometimes hard to see what the big fuss is all about. This slick tool is powered, not only by an intelligent crowd of askers and answerers, but by a well-crafted backend created by co-founders who honed their skills at Facebook. It is not surprising that, with all the smart people using this smart tool, there are many pondering on how it works so well. The NoSQL boffins scratch their heads and ponder such questions as, “ Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc?
Quora’s Technology Examined | Phil Whelan's Blog
Early Quora Design Notes - The Artypapers Weblog - Artypapers
Recently the startup I've been working at for 6 or so months launched its first product. Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers -- a place where you can find the best source for a wide range of information online; from local hotspots to esoteric Harry Potter trivia, it's all there. A lot of thought went into the Quora product design and even at this early stage many details have been revisited multiple times. So, I thought I'd share a few of the decisions and principles that went into the first major version of the beta product. Key Product Design Decisions Really early on I decided to focus only on the product design and would forgo any time spent on things like visual design and, to some extent, branding.
MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI.
Quora Answers The Question: How Will You Avoid Becoming Yahoo Answers?
Even Quora Can’t Answer “How Many People Use Quora?”
Q&A site Quora is officially reticent about sharing usage metrics which leads Quora fans to make some interesting calculations and guestimations. In fact there’s a fascinating topic section on Quora called “Quora usage and statistics” that attempts to parse all Quora related minutae from “Who has the most edits? to “How much time does it take for a question to come in” to “What’s the longest Quora answer?” to yes, “How many people use Quora?” The quest for some definite Quora analytics has gone so far that one enthusiastic Quora fan and TechCrunch reader has attempted to plot Quora’s growth by looking at the unique user ID numbers in its source code and plotting them against when Quora follower emails were sent as well as when specific questions were asked, compiling the data into the two graphs above and below. Going by code IDs alone the user graph and the one plotting Quora questions look pretty accurate at about 320K users and 110K questions to date.
Charlie Cheever, a co-founder of hot startup Quora, doesn’t really like the word “community” that much, for a number of reasons. Whatever he chooses to call it, building one is at the core of what he is trying to do with Quora , along with his co-founder and fellow Facebook alumnus Adam D’Angelo, the social network’s former chief technology officer. The startup has raised $11 million from Benchmark Capital (among others), but Cheever said in an interview with me that the company has no real interest in monetizing the community it has built so far around questions and answers.
For Quora, the Community is Everything: Tech News «
The Power of Quora & Why Benchmark was Right to Pay Up | Both Sides of the Table
I was an early user of Quora and like all new technologies they take a bit of playing with them for a while, discussing them with others and reflecting on them to let them sink in. I’m no wall flower so when something doesn’t resonate I’m usually pretty vocal about it. Here’s my experience, my “ah ha” moment and why I think, although still nascent, it’s one of the most powerful websites on the web right now. 1. Pre Quora – AVC & Answers OnStartupsQuora Has The Magic: Benchmark Invests at $86 Million Valuation
Quora , a new startup founded by ex-Facebook employees, has closed a first round of funding, and it’s a big one. Benchmark Capital has led the round and general partner Matt Cohler has taken a board seat at the company (Cohler is a former Facebook exec). Both Quora and Benchmark have confirmed the funding, but they won’t comment on the size of the round or the valuation. Our source for the story says it was an $11 million round that valued the company at $86 million. Additional investors may join the round as well. Elevation Partners was also rumored to have bid aggressively on the deal.
Quora Opens Up to Search Engines, Facebook Stays Closed
Quora, the hot question-and-answer startup founded by two former Facebook employees, has announced that it is opening its database up to be indexed by search engines today. This move to open up is something that Facebook — which recently launched a very similar service called Facebook Questions — has said it doesn’t plan to do, apparently preferring to maintain exclusive control over the information provided by users. As with many other things, the giant social network’s interest seems to lie in protecting its walled-garden approach to the data it harvests. Fittingly enough, the news about Quora came in the form of an answer to a question on the service about when the company would open up its content to search engines like Google (hat tip to All Facebook for noticing ).