My thoughts on Quora
I’ve been using Quora for a while now and its definitely the hot new thing. People are following all their contacts the way they did in the early days of Twitter.
At first I read people saying things like, “this is the next evolution of blogging” to which I’d say, “pffft”. Literally, I would make that sound. Try it.
But having really used it for several months and participated in discussions, started new ones and connected with people, I’m starting to get what’s special about it.
But it’s different than blogging. A blog is really you, the writer, starting a conversation and then hoping people join the dialogue with you. Quora is just the dialogue part and instead of you writing a blog post to start the conversation, you ask a question. And instead of the experience being locked on your blog, it’s shared in a community. A community that continues to build in a wikipedia-type way.
It’s also a decent way to research news and hot topics. For instance, some of the best speculation on the iPad 2 is on Quora.
Do I think Quora is the future of blogging? No. It’s a really cool feature, simple yet effective. I’m guessing a network like Linkedin will buy it or it will find it’s purpose licensing it’s service to websites to provide a living Q&A section. I think it wants to be the next Wikipedia, so I guess we’ll see how well it does against that.
For the short term I plan on continuing to play with it, so let’s connect and see where it goes.
Thanks for this, Jeff. Seen all the buzz and even signed up for an account, but haven’t participated yet. Quora just got moved up higher on my list. (1 point for proving the value of organic advocacy).
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jeff Hilimire, Adam Steinberg. Adam Steinberg said: RT @jeffhilimire: Blog: My thoughts on Quora. Love to hear yours… https://ow.ly/3NZRE […]
Thoughtful post Jeff. The thing I don’t understand about quora is how they have done so well in organic search so quickly. The site linking cannot be that entrenched given how young the service is. The site is here to stay just based on it’s organic placement. They must know something about googles algorithms that the rest of us don’t or am I missing something?
I’ve been playing around with Quora a bit but not too hard core. What would you say differentiates this from something like LinkedIn Answers (aside from being able to follow specific questions and topics)?
What’s the difference between LinkedIn Answers and Quora? The main difference is that Quora is uber-concerned with the quality and purpose of the questions and answers. No spam, no selling, none of that crap. So for that reason its a far better experience IMHO.
Makes sense. The selling portion in LI is pretty annoying. I could see how Quora could be more genuine.
[…] I wrote about Quora on this blog over a year ago. At the time, people were asking whether Quora was the future of blogging, to which I responded – in this instance, correctly – that Quora was in fact NOT the future of blogging. But there were aspects of it I enjoyed and I predicted – incorrectly this time – that I would keep using it. […]