The rise of Quora
- Image via CrunchBase
It’s been a few weeks since Quora exploded on Twitter. It seemed like the cool kids started talking about Quora within hours of Big Ben chiming in the new year. Since then, a big chunk of Twitter has been busy asking and answering questions on the social knowledge site.
While similar sites have been around for a while (the teenage-infested Formspring for one), this is the first site to allow users to share questions and answers with everyone, and for the community to edit answers themselves. Sort of like a Twitter version of Wikipedia.
Its sudden success seems to lie in the people who immediately adopted it. Influential, techy tweeters raved about the service, giving mere mortals the opportunity to pick the brains of their favourite tweeters (for free!)
Quora has clearly thought about the invite procedure too. By connecting the service with Facebook and Twitter accounts, users have access to a huge number of people to follow almost immediately. Quora has focused on Twitter in particular, as there’s already a community of people there who regularly ask and answer questions.
While Formspring might be the homeland of (for the most part) insecure teens, Quora is definitely for the eager-to-learn grown ups.
The future of the service remains to be seen, as does its impact on sites like Wikipedia and Twitter. But mock versions of the site are already springing up, a sure sign it’s made an impression.
What do you think about Quora? Short-term site or a part of the future of social media?
