Social Q/A Networking: Formspring

Ming Yeow Ng：The adoption of services like Quora, Instagram, Formspring suggests that consumers are very hungry for more, not less for more ways of connecting with others. To see why, lets answer this from a user pov, as opposed to theoretical arguments. The latter is pointless, because you end up with discussions like "Who needs another q&a site?"

formspring.me is one of the top 1,000 sites in the world. There are 439 sites with a better three-month global Alexa traffic rank than Formspring.me, and visitors to it view an average of 3.4 unique pages per day. Compared with internet averages, its users tend to be under the age of 25, and they tend to be low-income, childless Hispanics and women browsing from school and home who have no postgraduate education. About 3% of visits to the site are referred by search engines. The time spent in a typical visit to Formspring.me is approximately six minutes, with 45 seconds spent on each pageview.

Formspring is a community of millions of people connected by one simple thing: curiosity about one another. This curiosity drives engaging, authentic conversations between our community members about everything from their personal insights about sports, music and comedy to their opinions on movies, faith and fashion. With over one billion questions answered already, our community continues to grow across the globe. Whether it’s a universal question like “Who was your favorite teacher?” or a specific question about starting a business, Formspring provides a new, personal way to connect with the people who you want know better.

The Q&A market is on fire. In the last month alone, Ask.com relaunched with a community Q&A focus and Facebook released Facebook Questions to the first wave of users. That’s on top of the buzz surrounding Quora, Google’s acquisition of Aardvark, the explosive growth of Formspring, Apple’s acquisition of Siri and the juggernaut that is Yahoo! Answers. Speaking of question and answer, I have a one: Is there room for all of these approaches to delivering answers to users’ questions?

Formspring’s growth has been nothing short of meteoric lately; in fact, we’ve been told that this app has just passed the 14 million users mark. The way the company is adding features, creating clever integrations and tweaking the UI probably has a lot to do with that. For example, Formspring recently gave users the ability to export questions and answers to WordPress and MySpace. In excess of 200,000 users took advantage of this integration within the first few days of its launch.

Formspring was launched in November 2009 by the designers of online form builder Formstack as a side-project. They had noticed that most of their users were using the service to create "Ask me anything" forms, and decided to launch a separate site to make this easier. At launch, Formspring was referred to by its full URL, formspring.me, to distinguish it from Formstack, which was at that time also called Formspring. When formspring.me started to become popular, the original Formspring website was renamed to avoid confusion between the two sites.

Yes, traffic stopped growing a couple of months ago, but Formspring is still adding 200,000-300,000 users per week, and the traffic trend should come around soon...I think it's such a unique experience for users, that it's hard to fit into another platform. That's part of why Tumblr hasn't seen much traction with it, and part of why we grew so quickly. If Formspring's users could do what they do here elsewhere, they wouldn't have come to Formspring in the first place. Our average time on site is about nine and a half minutes. There's enough in Formspring that it's certainly a destination for people.

Then…today…well, let’s just say, “God bless social networking!” Twitter and a Q & A site called Formspring blew up today, although not from feed. Surprisingly, it all stemmed from Marcus Jordan, and then Dominique Keller re-tweeting everything and seemingly (though apparently not) adding his own thoughts. The names above are all linked to the pertinent places, and the important link for Keller’s Formspring site is here.

View Dominique Keller's profile on Formspring