Quora is the new social network that bases its activities on the exchange of questions and answers (Q&A) among its members.
Quora is a new social network, launched about a year ago but officially open for registrations in June 2010: a young but already quite lively social network, attracting 500,000 users in a short time.
The core of Quora is the exchange of information through questions and answers: a social network that feeds on content created by the users themselves. Users who, in order to access Quora, at this beta stage must be invited by already registered members, just like what happens with Diaspora.
Quora was born from the initiative of two former members of the Facebook team: Adam D’ Angelo and Charlie Cheeve. Although everything that somehow originates from Facebook suggests a challenge against the social network giant, Quora seems more like a more orderly and rational attempt, comparable in some ways to Yahoo! Answers or LinkedIn Answers but oriented towards the omniscience of Wikipedia.
In short, a big cauldron of continuous blogging, Q&A, forum-style interaction and socializing from a social network, all in English: the potential is all there to grow exponentially and to add value to one’s experience on yet another social network, however the risk is that – as users and content increase – the quality of answers might be lost.
A risk taken into account by the founders, who, however, rely on a system that highlights common interests among users interacting on related topics: in this way, over time and with contributions, relationships are formed that lead to “growing” in Quora, becoming experts on a particular subject.
Will this be enough to qualitatively save the new social network? D’angelo bets yes, confident in the positive force that develops within the Quora community. Basically, according to the founders’ hypotheses (or hope?!), trolls will naturally be kept in check and poorer content will be enriched by other users, becoming quality content thanks to mechanisms that evoke the concept of crowdsourcing.
This – in summary – is Quora, at least for the moment: we will follow the developments of this social network in the coming months, when it will exit the beta phase and when the exchanged information will start to grow.
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