Quora Research

What's the latest from Quora? The site is launching formal reviews for content like books, movies, and technology, allowing users to provide specific feedback on these popular topics in a more structured format.

“I think the biggest benefit is that it provides structure and categorization to this type of knowledge,” said Quora’s Marc Bodnick, who handles marketing for the company. He emphasized that Quora is not as interested in encouraging reviews of local businesses or restaurants, as sites like Yelp have a strong hold on that type of content. “The big reason why we’re excited to launch his product is to signal to readers and writers that there’s one place to write this type of question. So we’re hoping that if users think to themselves that if they want to write something about House of Cards, there will be a place to do that.”

Blogs are replacing Quora’s message board function, and all of those dispatches will retroactively be turned into blog posts. After a user writes a post, he or she then tags the post with a topic, and the blog post shows up in the feed of anyone following that topic – as opposed to other sites where the author’s reach is incumbent on how many followers they have. The move puts Quora in direct competition with Tumblr, and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn’s influencer program.

Marc Bodnick, who oversees the company’s product marketing, says the change will help Quora’s audience find more unknown writers that don’t want to take the time to develop and nurture their own followings. About 250,000 people follow Quora’s movie topic and about 200,000 follow the food topic, for example. The company would not say how many users it has overall.

The new product feels organic. Just sorting through my own feed of questions, I see answers that are longer than most articles and some that approach long-form magazine story length. To give them a more open-ended context seems fitting. One concern, though, is the possibility of Quora feeds becoming inundated with garbage blog posts, though Bodnick assures that Quora’s quality filters and upvote/downvote system would prevent that.

Looking for a new platform for blogging, and finding that existing sites aren't sufficient? You might check out Quora's new blogging platform, which it plans to release Wednesday, that will allow users to create posts on the site and share information.

“We’re not going to be a place for cat photos,” said Marc Bodnick, a product and business executive at Quora who explained the product in an interview Wednesday. “We’re not a site for light, viral, multimedia-sharing without text. We’re a site where people share ideas and thoughts. So the same type of people who write answers are going to be the same types of people who write on blogs.”

Quora has released a new feature enabling users to connect with topic experts in real-time. Online Now is an enhancement of its Ask To Answer program.

With 25% of the site’s traffic coming from mobile devices, the company is heavily interested in speeding up the process — let’s face it, if you want to see a particular movie and want to know how good it is, you might ask the community on Quora, but you don’t want to wait several minutes to get a response, you want it right away. Online Now hopes to help accomplish that. As an update to its Ask to Answer feature where users use credits to pay others to answer their questions, Quora is enabling people to solicit answers from topic experts that are on the service at that very moment.

Through the use of an algorithm, Quora says that Online Now will help you find better people to answer your questions within moments — Bodnick says that it’s always been about connecting users with people who could help answer questions, but now about speed and quality. Prior to today, it was an asynchronous experience where everything was posted and created great content, but now it’s all about the real-time experience and for those situations that are time-sensitive, the company says the experience is going to get better.

At Quora we believe great writers deserve readers. We make this happen by identifying high-quality writing and getting it in front of large and relevant audiences:

Active writers on Quora average 30,000+ monthly views and 350,000+ estimated annual views.
Our most active writers average 90,000+ monthly views and 1+ million estimated annual views.
Many great answers on the site go viral -- read by tens of thousands of people.

Today we are announcing Blogs, a new product that will make Quora an even better place for great writing.

Personally, I’m a nerd for products that are driven by fanatical beliefs. The types that make critics cringe and everyone else go, “whaaa??” Products like Snapchat (ephemerality is an inherent trait of communication), and Medium (the distribution of content should be determined by the quality of the idea not popularity of the author). In my opinion, Quora’s Q&A offering has a place right alongside those two. It’s a novel, bold perspective on publishing.

At first glance, Quora Blogs seems like a blog offering that is not much different than the rest (which explains my reaction). But I am too young and inexperienced to give Adam D’Angelo and his team anything but the benefit of the doubt. What we share is the hope that more people feel comfortable openly sharing their ideas online. It would make the world a better place, and if Quora Blogs helps to move that needle then it’s a worthy endeavor in my book.

What's going on here? Guesses on what their thinking is?

Today Quora becomes a publishing platform. OK, technically the social network was already a publishing platform. The Q & A element is still there, but today's two new product announcements take Quora from a user-generated social site to old-fashioned publisher.

by Kent Palmer

Branch looks more like the kind of system I have been advocating here on Quora. Quora misses the boat when it comes to true dialogue. Looks like Branch has thought a bit deeper about to nature of real dialogue. It will be interesting to experiment with this new medium to see if it is really better than Quora in its design.

[to be continued . . .]

Adding Pinterest friends via Facebook is really interesting. Most of my Facebook friends using Pinterest are people I went to high school or college with and have never heard the phrase 'tech startup.' What has Pinterest done that helped them gain mainstream interest, and what could Quora learn from this rise, if anything?

How likely is it that Quora could materially improve on Branch's "conversations" and when and if it launches a conversations product?

As I see it, Pinterest and Quora boards are totally separate. They don't compete. The only idea is that they have "board" in common. They are used in different ways and for different purposes and have much different functionality. The only thing they have in common is that they are boards.

If you accept that:

- ideas are worth less than good execution
- Quora's boards are way better for text than Pinterest's even though they came later
- Quora completely reimagined boards
- Branch has an interesting idea - but maybe it could be better

Then how likely is it that Quora will reimagine "conversations"?

Sibling Q&A:

1. Should Quora launch a "discussion" or "conversation" feature? If so, what should it be like?
2. Andy Lemke's answer to What about Quora should be changed?
3. Branch (startup): Should conversations on Branch be considered resources, similar to the way that question and answer pages on Quora are considered resources?
4. Quora: What could Quora learn from Branch?
Then how likely is it that Quora will reimagine "conversations"?

Russell

I was very excited about Quora and hoped that it would build enough of a knowledge-base to overtake even Google. However, the user base has never extended beyond Silicon Valley.

A quick look at Google Trends reveals a sad reality for Quora

And finally Quora’s biggest problem: it gets far less interesting after a few months of use. The site will serve you up the same topics and the same people day after day, and although it might suggest new people to follow, it won’t suggest new topics.

This is a classic consequence of designing a social network around “warrens” rather than “plazas”: after a while people become locked in their own little communities, and the lack of new blood leads to a slow decay, and eventually death, as all the interesting people just “evaporate”.

The results is that if like me you joined Quora for its great startup-related content, your timeline is probably filled with questions like “How many employees does Airbnb have?”, which frankly, I don’t care a damn about. And since the startup community is still the most active on Quora by far, other topics will more often than not be drowned in the tech flood.

Followers 2885
Following 790
Topics 91
Boards 17
Questions 30
Answers 323
Edits 1583

In particular, is it okay if done with a selfish intention to earn more credits?

100 credits to Promote Post to 200 People

Future of Education / themes to follow..

For entrepreneurs, Quora has become the new Hacker News: the go-to-place to glean great, rich information related to startups – culture, technology, product, design, history, financing, etc. It’s all there and much of it is outstanding.

My goal is help build a list of must read Quora threads for entrepreneurs and startups. This is by no means a comprehensive list – so I encourage you to share threads that are important / helpful to you and I will supplement the list.

In no particular order, here is a list of Quora threads that I think are critically important to startups. I have tried to include content relevant to all avenues of entrepreneurship: from hiring to product to financing… and everything in between. And enjoy spending the next hour getting lost on Qoura =)

Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. This will be the first in a series of essays on Quora that he will post on TechCrunch. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah

The incredible growth of Quora has also led to an equally incredible growth in chatter, punditry, and analysis about the future of social networking. The opinions range from thought-provoking (“the knowledge network comes online”) to routine (“the new form of blogging”) to flatly illogical (“this is the next Twitter, Foursquare, or Wikipedia”). In reality, the elements of discovery, serendipity, and search that dovetail seamlessly from the Quora product have captured the imagination of its users (myself included) and have placed the company in a rare, enviable position. During these types of growth periods and transitions, though, some like to sound off, using their blogs, Twitter accounts, and Quora itself to beg for new features, complain about the quality of their experience, and to make predictions that do not take stock of history nor the current context. There is significant hype around Quora, but I believe it’s warranted. As a I result, I’ve attempted to produce a synthesis of the questions swirling around the rise of Quora and to offer answers to them, too. These answers are my own, but of course, you could peruse the Quora topic or specific related questions below on Quora to answer them yourself.

Conversation certainly engages its participants. But it also raises the cost of participation. One of the things I love about Google is that it gives me information without unnecessary overhead. When I want conversation, I go to social venues like Twitter.

Perhaps Quora can be both a question answering site and a social network. But I suspect it will need to choose. Most people don’t have the time or patience to participate in additional communities, so question answering is the easier sell to a mass audience. But the participation is what makes Quora especially distinctive today. Perhaps it’s a question of quality vs. quantity.

Here’s the real problem with Quora, and why it’s going to struggle, until it solves it.

There’s no information architecture. It’s just a huge pile of unorganized content. The value in a Q&A service is the ability for people to process the answers and find useful information, or at least predict where they’re going to find this information. Hunch suffers from a similar problem – it’s hard to know which ‘Hunch’ is going to answer your question. Until Quora finds a way to put some normalization onto the questions, the pile is just going to get bigger and harder to sift through. And this normalization is a hard problem, particularly for subjective questions, which is what currently predominates in Quora. It won’t be an easy thing for them to fix. Wikipedia (to which many comparisons are made relative to Quora) has a pretty clear information architecture, and a dis-ambiguation mechanism, and it’s data model elements are primarily (simple) nouns (Places, People, Topics) – whereas Quora’s primary content are usually (complex) subjectively phrased questions.

Quora has pioneered the use of the Interest Graph as a dominant signal for its newsfeed. Quora asks new users to select Topics to follow, as part of its onboarding process, which is the first revelation that Topics are as important as Users to follow.

Quora’s newsfeed is an interesting showcase of what happens when you mix an Interest Graph with a Social Graph – and the result is the mysterious addictiveness so many have experienced, but found difficult to explain. An item pops up in your newsfeed not because you were following a user, but because you were following a related topic.

This often leads to Personalized Serendipity – or Unexpected Relevance – which is why Quora gets many people hooked.

Quora, the social Q&A platform, is beginning to get its sea legs. There are so many ways to use Quora, well beyond just asking and answering questions. Some people like to answer and ask questions. Others like to vote on answers or neatly file similar questions into topics.

172 People follow a topic

i cannot add a topic there as that already exists under that company name. help! i just want to create a page (like this, as an example - TBWA)