Quora: A New Player in the World of Social Media?

Quora has been receiving a lot of online and offline media coverage recently. So this weekend I sat down to explore the product, read some articles and find out what the hype is all about.


What is Quora?

Quora is a question and answer service, similar in ways to yahoo answers: you post a question and it is answered by real people through a login or facebook connect.

Okay, this sounds like yahoo answers with an open graph feature, how is it different? I googled my question and found this thread on Quora: How is Quora different to X? A bit of a worrying start in my opinion. Surely the conversation around a new product such as this should revolve around how it can be used, not what it is?

As I continued to read I discovered this article by Saneel Radia over on BBH Labs. Where as I am still on the fence regarding Quora, he most definitely is not:

"To clarify, it’s not that I don’t like Quora. It’s that I hate it and want it wiped off the face of the earth."

He makes a very valid point regarding the "How is Quora different to X?" conversation I mentioned earlier:

"OK, so maybe #Twitter was a trending topic on Twitter the first 6 months. But those conversations were focused primarily on usage and innovation with the platform. The Quora self-referential conversations are literally people scratching their heads looking for value. There’s no better sign that the emperor has no clothes people."

His article has sparked quite a heated debate in the comments section. 

On the other side of the fence The Telegraph claims that Quora will be bigger than Twitter and is full of praise for the product:

"Twitter was fun for the few, but Quora will be useful to the many. It's is the place to go for on-demand answers to specific questions from people who know what they're talking about. That's something no search engine - or existing social network - comes close to. Monetisation strategies present themselves readily, where they did not - and still do not - in the microblogging platform's case."

Quora is still in it's infancy and it will be interesting see when all the hype dies down whether it will stick, or suffer a similar fate to Google Wave. For now I'm going to sit back, watch and reserve a definite personal opinion until later (it's a very comfortable fence).