On Quora

So I used Quora. To be honest with you, I did not really expect a QA platform to be the next big thing in the world of social media. But as it turns out, Quora has caught on. And how.

Quora has done certain things effectively. For starters, it has taken an age old tradition of having QA forums and given it a social turn. Most Googlers, searching for information on the web are taken either to Wikipedia or to QA forums (like this and this for us, the one's who like to code). So its nothing new.

What Quora has done is taken this formula, which works and applied a social aspect to it. It has taken aspects of google wave, facebook and twitter. And made a beautiful implementation. Some of the features of quora, that immediately attracted me(and several others, it seems), would be:

• Content which is both objective and subjective in nature - This illustrates my point beautifully. And though as Daniel rightly points out, it'll be some time before quora can replace wiki's or google search in general, it has opened up a platform where you can not only get your queries on anything under the sun answered, the methodology and the approach it implements leads to some interesting possibilities.
• Easy to understand and well defined user interaction - I remember when people first started joined facebook in India, it seemed a hugely daunting task to actually figure the damn thing out. But I did not have that problem with Quora. There are users, there are categories. You ask questions. Or you answer them. Or you rate answers. And if your answers are rated, you get credibility. Simple. And it works beautifully. Also you can choose to follow people, topics or particular questions. And receive notification in case of any updates.
• Get what you want - The problem we've all faced with facebook is that it suffers from a lack of segregation. Just visit my wall and you'll come across interesting technical reads I've posted alongside my party pictures from last Saturday. It's all fine and dandy, except there are certain people who are interested in the party pictures and some who are interested in the articles and some who are interested in both. Facebook has solved this problem by making all of it available to everyone on my friends list. However Quora has a more interesting take on this issue. You can choose to follow people and topics that the people you follow are following. This filters the content to a great extent and only what you want is presented to you.
• Reliability - This is a slightly dicey point but i believe that the rating system that Quora has implemented should enable the user to judge the reliability of the answers. The internet has become so vast and enormous that it is not possible for any one organization to verify content. The buzz word of today is user generated content. The veracity of such content is questionable to say the least. What these people (like others before them) have done is taken an algorithmic approach to rate the genuineness of the user who generates the content. What they have done differently is put this entire formula in a social aspect. This introduces a gaming aspect to Quora. You answer questions with the hope that people will rate you answer. You try to ask intelligent questions to extricate the most number of intelligent answers. You can almost hear the social machinery working in the background. And getting people to pull their pants up.

Given all of this quora still has a long way to go. Today most of the answers and discussions over there are related to Silicon Valley matters. The user base has to expand to include experts in other fields. But this incurs the risk of including too many users, thus drastically cutting down on the reliability issue.

Also the question has to be raised. What exactly is Quora? Its is a blog? Is it networking? Or Superman? My take on this is, it could be all of the above. As with most Social websites with user interactions, the websites seem to take their own course. A perfect example can be found here.

So as its user base expands, how Quora evolves and emerges could be very different from what we see it as today.

It remains to be seen if Quora can keep up its newfound popularity. However I strongly believe that this is a new step towards the future of Social Media with products that are better aligned towards specific user needs. Fingers crossed.