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. Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years? I’ve now been blogging for 10 years. Looking back we haven’t seen all that much innovation for bloggers. You have a box. You type in it. Put an image into it. But now comes Quora. I’m really loving it. VC Shervin Pishevar says “I believe @Quora is the future of blogging.” Wow. So what’s going on there? First, look at the Quora items I’ve been participating in. So, what is the innovation here? First, it learned from Twitter. Second, they learned from Facebook. Third, they learned from the best social networks. Fourth, they learned from blogs about how to do great SEO. Fifth, they learned from FriendFeed, Digg, and other systems that let you vote up things.
Sixth, they brought the live “engagement display” that Google Wave had: it shows who is answering a question WHILE they are answering it. Seventh, it has a great search engine for you to find things you are interested in. Anyway, I find that there’s something addictive about participating over there instead of here on my blog. Why I was wrong about Quora. I must apologize to Dave Winer. He warned me about supporting services that aren’t the open web and I wasn’t willing to listen to him a month ago, because I was infatuated with a cool new service that lots of insiders were supporting. I’ve seen a LOT of discussion about Quora in the past few weeks since I wrote it could be the biggest blogging innovation in the past decade. GigaOm even wrote a post asking whether it was worth the more than $80 million the investors are hoping it’s worth. Turns out I was totally wrong.
Even worse, I’m getting dozens of emails from people pissed that their questions have been changed, their answers marked “not helpful,” or that they got kicked off the service altogether. These are all things that are allowed on blogs, even welcomed, and no one can downvote my blogs here. Why? Because if you gather a group that doesn’t like you, or your writings, for some reason, you can get voted down, which effectively makes your answer disappear. Quora Is Really About A Better Wikipedia. Robert Scobleized Quora today. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I mentioned super-blogger Robert Scoble’s penchant for taking very strong positions on technology and startups and then reversing those decisions completely on a whim. I love him for his quick retreats. And I certainly admire a man who’s willing to rethink his opinion after weighing new evidence.
But that’s not what Scoble did when he trashed Quora earlier today. He decided that Quora was a blogging service, or some kind of Friendfeed or Twitter-like place for conversations. And when he realized that it doesn’t do those things very well, he lashed out. “It’s a horrid service for blogging,” says Scoble. Yup. The thing is, most of us have always known that. Quora is ostensibly a Q&A site. Or, in Robert’s case, he’s mad that his car won’t cook him dinner. When you think of Quora, think about Wikipedia, not Twitter or FriendFeed or a blog. Like Wikipedia, Quora can be a horrid place to voice an opinion.
Nearly Every Single Topic On Quora Now Has A Twitter Account. Early last month, we noted that Quora was doing something rather interesting. They were using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to mass-create Twitter accounts. That may sound shady, but it really isn’t. They’re doing it as an alternative to RSS feeds. And Twitter is totally cool with it. Those feeds are now live and ready to roll. As Quora engineer Belinda Gu writes on (where else) Quora: Q&A Site Quora Builds Buzz With A-List Answerers. Before co-founding Quora, the Q&A site that's become a beehive for the technorati, Charlie Cheever spent a lot of time wondering why it wasn't easier to answer those pesky questions that kept popping into his head. "I did this exercise," Cheever tells Fast Company, "I’d catch myself at every point in the day when I wanted to know something and I tried to imagine what life would be like if that information was available.
" His questions ranged from the practical (when is that restaurant open?) To the esoteric (why are parking spaces shaped like that?) , yet despite a plethora of ways to share photos, status updates, and personal information on social networks there was a gaping hole where knowledge like that could reside and be shared. "Most of the important things fit into the [Facebook, Twitter, etc.] model. But there is no real place for all the stuff you think about," he says. The "we" is Cheever and his former Facebook colleague Adam D'Angelo.
Can Quora Survive Its Growing Popularity? Updated: If you’re a web service, especially a young startup, you want to get as many users as possible, right? But there are worse things than having a small number of users — particularly when the service you are offering depends on the quality of the content provided by those users. Quora, the red-hot Q&A site that has been growing at a dramatic rate over the past few months, finds itself in that position now: The site depends on high-quality answers, and has deliberately kept things small in order to cultivate a knowledgeable community.
But can it keep those virtues when membership is exploding and not everyone wants to play by the rules? Early on in its growth, Quora — which was launched early last year by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo and fellow Facebooker Charlie Cheever — made it clear it wanted to remain small in order to cultivate a community that would be different from, and better than, other web services by keeping out trolls and focusing on positive behavior.