what is quora?

The best site you (probably) have never heard of.

I started playing around on Quora a little over a year ago. In that time I’ve become addicted. However it’s one of these sites that no has heard of beyond Silicon Valley and a few people connected to Valley’ers/obsessed with tech. So let’s talk about it.

So what is Quora?

1) It’s like Twitter. But for people who want to learn things and/or have intelligent discussions.

On twitter we can follow celebrities and other high-profile folks to get a view into their world (and follow our friends too). On quora we can follow the folks who are experts in areas we want to learn about, follow specific topics that are of interest, and can see our friends’ answers.

Assuming you’ve followed enough topics/people, when you pull up the site instead of seeing updates from your friends (Facebook or Twitter) you’ll see new questions and answers about people and topics that interest you. Really addicting if you like to learn new things or to answer questions.

2) It’s like blogging. But directed. Blogging answers questions that you have, while Quora is about answering questions other people have.

Typically I blog about things that I’m asking myself in my head or that I find really interesting. It’s really “answering questions no one asked”. Like say this post, “What is Quora?”. It has it’s place, but there’s something cool about answering a question that you know someone definitely cares about (because they asked it). I can’t speak for all bloggers, but there’s a large satisfaction that I get when I know that a post of mine is appreciated/well-read. I get that feeling a lot more on Quora. I believe bloggers have a “contributor”-mindset, and Quora is sort of a utopia for this mindset (more on why below).

3) It’s like Facebook. But nothing like Facebook actually.

It’s like Facebook in that it gets social design very, very right. Facebook is killer because the whole process of sharing (and consuming) updates, photos and many other forms of information with your friends is frictionless. Quora has designed a *terrific* social experience around asking and answering questions from the way you follow people/topics, the use of the the Facebook connect feature to encourage you to invite key people to the service, the “voting up/down” of votes which reward people who contribute awesome answers (while also curating the service so the next person browsing the question will immediately see the best answer), and so on. It’s amazing social design which we’ll likely increasingly see in every web service in the coming year(s).

So checkout Quora! I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. You’ll also see a bunch of answers from me on technology, politics, marketing, and other things I’m interested in. I’ve been meaning to blog more, especially about the campaign, but was struggling with where to start. So I decided to jump in with thoughts that I’ve been meaning to write up for the past year (like this one!)