Quora Gamifies: Credits And “Ask To Answer” Suggestions Live For Everyone. 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. For example, I can earn 45 Credits if I answer the question, “Which business model would be better for a “find a co-founder” website: Match.com or eHarmony?”
So is Quora just trying to tack on gamification to see if it’ll stick? 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. Marc Bodnick's Announcement of the Policy Change As Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all crossed the chasm from early adopter plaything to mainstream acceptance, brand advocates and marketers followed.
Quora’s Technology Examined | Phil Whelan's Blog. 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? “. In this blog post I will delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. Components Of Quora The general components that make up Quora are… The last point, the super-fast auto-complete search-box, is one of the defining features of Quora.
What’s Cooking Under That Hood? The Search-Box Speedy Queries Nginx. Early Quora Design Notes - The Artypapers Weblog - Artypapers. January 21st, 2010 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.
I didn't really know how that would play out at the time but I knew I wanted to get as much built as possible and as quickly as possible and hoped this artificial constraint would pay other, as yet unknown dividends. Old Quora Header. 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. The gist? For Quora, the Community is Everything: Tech News « 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. “We’re not really focused on making money right now,” he said. “I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.” What problem is Quora is trying to solve? So far, Quora has been able to do a fairly good job of keeping its interactions high-quality, something the startup paid a lot of attention to while it was in invite-only beta. The Power of Quora & Why Benchmark was Right to Pay Up. 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. With Quora, it was the opposite – something has always felt right but it took me a while to really understand it. I now do. 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. Take AVC.com, the blog by Fred Wilson. He wrote a blog post that always stuck with me about how there are regulars on his blog who hang out there a bit like “Cheers” just having a chat with a metaphorical beer in hand.
And to give credit where it’s due (in addition to the content that Fred produces) a lot of the discussion works well because of the Disqus commenting platform. 2. 3. “Mark, you put a lot of time into blogging and so you have a large following now. Quora 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 first launched in private beta on January 4, 2010, just a few months ago. To get in you have to convince a current user to use one of their ten invitations on you. But there’s a magic to Quora that has captured Silicon Valley’s imagination.
I sat down with Cofounders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, and new investor Matt Cohler, to talk with them about what makes Quora so special. Quora Opens Up to Search Engines, Facebook Stays Closed. Quora. Quora, a Q&A service founded by early Facebook employees that has generated quite a bit of buzz, has launched to the public. The service first made its debut on January 4, 2010, but was previously restricted to users who had been invited (or had requested an invite from the site). The news was announced this evening in an article in the Wall Street Journal. Quora was attracting plenty of attention since the day it launched its private beta, but things really picked up in March, when we heard that the service raised around $11 million from Benchmark Capital at a whopping $86 million valuation (the WSJ says it eventually raised $14 million at a $87.5 million valuation, so there’s some discrepancy here that may be due to additional investors other than Benchmark).
At the time, we sat down with Benchmark’s Matt Cohler and Quora cofounders Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, who outlined their goals with Quora and how they would face looming hurdles. Their biggest challenge is about to begin. How Quora Is Trying to Build an Ideal Society. Since launching Quora at the beginning of this year as a sort of thinking person’s Yahoo Answers, former Facebook employees Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo have increased their staff to 11, raised $11 million, opened up to the public, and grown a vibrant community of questioners and answerers – even if they do still converse mainly about the San Francisco Bay Area and tech entrepreneurship. It’s become a site I visit most every day. So I recently went down to Palo Alto to meet up with Cheever for the first time since January. So what is Quora up to? The top items on the company’s list, said Cheever, are growth and maintaining a high bar for quality content – and the two are often at odds.
The thing that most stood out from our conversation is that Quora thinks of its role as one of governance. “Our No. 1 thing is knowledge that people trust,” said Cheever. Another big focus has been catering to power users. Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):