Quora: An Awesome Tool for… Something
It’s just that nobody is quite sure what Quora is for, exactly. But we’re no less excited about it. We’re talking about why it’s awesome and how to use it.
According to Quora’s people,
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. Quora was founded in April 2009 by Adam D’Angelo, who was previously CTO and VP of engineering at Facebook, and Charlie Cheever, who led Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform.
So it’s about questions and answers. But all of the questions are editable by all of the users, as are the answers. You can follow people, but you can also follow topics and questions, and even answers to questions. You can give things thumbs up. So is it like Wikipedia? Uh, no. Wikipedia is all answers and no questions.
Quora has been adopted by media agencies and mainstream users much more quickly than Twitter and Facebook, but that may be due in part to the fact that we all feel stupid for being such slow adopters of those tools. And Quora doesn’t really compete with either directly, or even with LinkedIn, which also has a robust question and answer feature. It’s different, which is a difficult feat to accomplish, in and of itself.
It integrates with your blog. You can post your questions and answers directly to your blog, even a self-hosted version of Wordpress. The idea is to become the largest repository of socially-produced answers to the largest batch of questions anyone could possibly ever ask.
Facebook owns the social graph for now. Google owns the map of the URL’s of the world. And Twitter owns the rapid distribution of news and opinion. Will Quora own collaborative social research?
Have you used Quora? What do you think?
In addition to serving as Editor of Fuel Your Blogging, Brandon is also a Pastor at Saddleback Church and Online Community Coordinator for Pastors.com. He’s also a web designer, blogger, and church communications consultant. Catch him on his own blog or on Twitter.
I honestly haven’t heard about Quora. Makes me seem backward or out of touch. Or maybe it’s the same for a lot of people. Sounds very interesting. Have to look into it. Could be a useful tool – if used correctly.
Thanks for enlightening me.