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.

Tagged as: blogging, quora