Social Brand Visibility: Quora

One of the newest ‘kid on the block’, and a different kind of social networking, is a site called Quora.

Founded by Adam D’Angelo, a former Facebook CTO , and Charlie Cheever, with initial funding of $11 million against a valuation of $86 million, it is the new arrival to the online knowledge base market.

Started in June 2009 and first launched in beta in January 2010, it went public in June 2010, Quora is a continually improving and changing collection of questions and answers, created and edited by anyone.

Users can pose questions, give answers and make the site grow. They can also comment on the answers given and vote them up or down which affects their placement on the page. It is an evolving community not dissimilar to Wikipedia. A collective knowledge base that is dependent on the collective good will of people to alert and change damaging information.

The founders want each question to have an answer page which will become the best possible resource for someone who is looking for an answer. A collection of summaries which reflects the consensus of the community. A blogging feature has been added called Quora Posts.

Quora is attracting attention since the day it has been launched because of its sleek interface and the very high quality of the answers. It is not unusual for someone to post a question and be answered by the top expert in the field, within hours. The big question is if Quora will be able to maintain that high quality of answers over time. They promised that if the quality of the answers will go down they will clamp down on new users.

Here is what Adam D’Angelo said about his site in March 2010: “Previously, there were two ways to register for Quora. You could either get an invitation from an existing user, or you could enter your email address in the box on our home page, and we’d invite you as soon as we scaled our capacity up.

We’ve gotten to the point where we are confident that we can integrate new users as they sign up and maintain the quality of the site, and so we are opening up registration today. However, we put quality ahead of growth as a priority, and so we will change plans and limit registration as necessary to achieve that goal. We are not opening up to search engines at this point.”

Competitors are Yahoo Answers and Facebook Questions. It is ranked 588 in the US and is also popular in the UK where it is ranked 462. Most of the users are Caucasians, disproportionately higher income men, childless and browsing from home.

Sources:

• Crunchbase
• Quora
• TechCrunch: Quora has the Magic benchmark at 86 Million Valuation
• TechCrunch: Quoras Highly Praised QA Services Launches to the Public
• Wikipedia