Quora : A New Success Story
When entire world is going gaga over Facebook and Twitter, I see a new champion emerging at the dais. This champion is focused at its work. It’s not wasting time to do experiments but quickly grabbing the top influential folks of the industry. Werner Vogels [from Amazon], Evan Williams [from Twitter], Dennis Crowley [from FourSquare] and Steve Case [former AOL chairman] are just few of them. The name of this new champion is Quora.
What is Quora?
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. This is the official answer from Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora. He wrote this while answering this question “What is Quora?”. At this page, you will find several other answers from Quora evangelists and Quora reviewerers.
There are some initial myths about Quora. Let’s take them one by one.
Myth 1: Many people will not like to join “another network”
My Views: I don’t agree with this notion. People love to try new things. They get bored with using same service. Change is constant and that’s why we said good bye to Orkut, MySpace and adopted Facebook, Twitter. If a new service is giving you a different dimension, a new way to satisfy your eagerness – you would love to try that.
Myth 2: Quora is for focused groups
My Views: In the beginning everything looks like a service for few people only. If you remember, Facebook was only for fun when it was started. Look at the scenario now. Every business wants its presense on Facebook. Same happened with Twitter. People were not sure as why they should use it. They thought it’s only for celebrities but that’s not the case now. I see the same with Quora. It may have some focused attention right now but going forward it will definitely have a broad appeal.
My experience with Quora
While preparing my blog SEO is overhyped I thought to get the opinion of others, especially those who are working in this industry. I asked a question on Quora and Interestingly the very first answer was from Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-Founder, SEOmoz. Other answers were also from reputed professionals. Isn’t it interesting?
Challenges for Quora
Every organization, be it a big one or small one, has some challenges. Quora has just started its journey and it also has some challenges. As I perceive, the toughest challenge in front of Quora is Quality and Sustainability.
Quality
Currently when you ask a question on Quora, you get quality answers from experts of the industry. It is possible as number of users and number of questions, both are less. When both will grow, the challenge would be to maintain the same quality. Quora will have to continuously attract experts from every spectrum of life.
Sustainability
The domain of Question-Answers is less traveled and less explored. The chances of getting initial success was high. Quora gained the initial momentum. Now, when the niche is known and some bigger players are also venturing in, the challegne for Quora would be sustainability. It would be nice to see as how they manage to beat the rest.
You can ask a question to me on Quora at http://www.quora.com/Nitesh-Ambuj
Quora still has invitation based sign up process. Let me know if you need one.
There’s no doubt that the success of startups like Quora have propelled the Q&A space into the spotlight. And there seems to be room for other niche Quora-like sites. Check out the entire story here –
http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/19/google-ventures-leads-600k-investment-in-lawpivot-a-quora-for-startup-legal-advice/
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What Is Quora’s Biggest Challenge?
The most immediate issue, simply put, is noise. How can it make sure that users are not inundated with discussions they care nothing about?
Check out more on this – http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/quoras-challenge/
Hi Nitesh..very informative article.I want to try Quora.Can you plz send an invitation to me.My mail id is mukul.tcs@gmail.com.
Thank you..
Hi Nitesh ! Thanks for the information. Do you think Quora has created a new paradigm in data mining ? Would be glad if you invite me to create a Quora account 🙂
Hi,
I have seen the quora its good website.
Can I get the invitation on it.
Mt email id is nimish_c_patel@hotmail.com
I have been in love with Quora and now feel that this is the best evangelism platform….connecting and sharing knowledge. This is a new, productive and real time platform.
Sounds quite nice! If you still have invites, I’d be grateful!