Quora
Posted: Thursday 03 March, 2011
Pete Goold
There's lots of buzz about Quora at present, so I've just signed up and have been playing with the site.
Following the Google algorithm announcement last weekend, lots of sites have been downgraded as they're perceived as content farms by Google. Quora wasn't one that has been heavily mentioned subsequently, although the likes of Squidoo were.
What was most noted about the initial user experience of Quora is that the Facebook connect and Twitter API functionality now really do work together well when integrated properly to a new social site's sign up process. The only other site I have used personally which has done it so well is Posterous, which was the first site that I noticed that really did as it managed to find an almost magical way to ease the sign up process through leveraging existing contacts across other networks.
As described by Wikipedia, Quora is an "online knowledge market which aggregates questions and answers to many topics and allows users to collaborate on them". So, a cross between a wiki and Ask Jeeves, then.
So, why bother using Quora? As ever, Mashable is reliable in this area, with articles like '9 Ways To Get More Out of Quora'.
As a newbie it strikes me that a primary commercial purpose for this (or indeed Yahoo Anwers, Answers.com etc), aside from industry navel gazing, is the ability to ask for shared experiences to compare with one's own. So, questions that will either validate or invalidate a hypothesis for example.
On that basis I've given it a test drive - let's see what comes back over the next few days and weeks.
