WebProNews

Tag: Quora

  • Quora Raises $50 Million in Series B Funding

    Quora, a sort Q&A site organized by its community of users, has just raised $50 million in Series B funding, with a valuation of $400 million. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo, former CTO at Facebook, put up $20 million of his own money, and Peter Thiel, Benchmark Capital (they had led Series A and Benchmark’s Matt Cohler is on the board), Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures contributed the rest.

    On the Quora company blog, D’Angelo answers some questions regarding how the platform will allocate the $50 million:

    Build out the very best team to achieve this. There are many challenges in getting high-quality knowledge about everything onto the web. We need to design a great product to help everyone to easily share their knowledge with the world, to look up and learn from the knowledge that others have shared, and to give us signals about the quality of everything they read. We need to build and improve our systems that use all of these signals to automatically figure out which content is the most interesting, appropriate, and relevant to each person and show them only that.
    Scale up technically. As we grow, we need to build new systems that can handle the increased scale, and our infrastructure costs increase. We need to make sure that as we build these new systems they increase the speed at which we can iterate on the product rather than slowing us down. We project a large portion of this money to go to EC2 and other AWS bills. It might be replaced by whatever the most appropriate place for us to run our infrastructure is in the future but as of today it’s looking like EC2.
    Focus on the long term. We intend to use some of this funding as a cushion in case of macroeconomic changes. More than half our series A funds from two years ago are actually still in our bank account today. We could have waited longer to raise this round, but we wanted to extend our runway. That lets us keep our focus on long-term growth and quality, and lets us avoid making short term tradeoffs like many other companies.

    Quora presently garners about 180,000 monthly active users and about 20,000 daily active users. Some wonder how this sort of traffic might validate $50 million in funding. Quora had been in the news quite a bit in 2011 as an intriguing meld of Wikipedia and Twitter, but its relatively small user base indicates that investors must predict some significant growth – which D’Angelo mentions in regards to expanding infrastructure. Still, 20K active daily users?

    Like most things internet, perhaps the deal has to do with Facebook. D’Angelo was the former CTO of the Social Network, and Thiel was an early investor. Maybe they’ve banked on an association with Facebook’s impending IPO, which has already sold out.

  • Facebook Engineers Discuss Time Travel

    Facebook Engineers Discuss Time Travel

    There’s a very interesting thread on Quora, in which people of varying backgrounds are discussing time travel. Specifically, they’re addressing a pretty good question: Why are people from the future not time traveling to our period?

    There is a lot of good discussion about it – 32 answers, to be exact, but I found it particularly interesting that a couple of Facebook engineers took on the topic.

    “If time travel were to exist, it may depend on forking the universe so that time continues separately down two paths with and without the time traveler’s disruption,” writes Facebook engineer Tom Whitnah. “If that’s the case we may exist on a series of forks that were never disrupted by a time traveler, but parallel universes exist where ‘we’ have confirmed interactions with future dwellers. Maybe eventually the version of you asking this question will experience a future dweller in the fork in the universe ‘you’ experience.”

    Facebook software engineer Liz Zhang also weighs in: “If you think conservation of energy + mass is true, and time is just another dimension you can move within, there should be nothing left in the past once you (and the world) proceeded into the future. Otherwise, you have the contradiction that by travelling back in time, you can arbitrarily increase the amount of mass & energy exist in the world. So I guess you might be able to travel back in time, but you will see nothing (empty, ether, null) there, because we have moved on.”

    OK, a couple of software guys who happen to work at Facebook simply talking about time travel doesn’t exactly mean Facebook will be inventing a time machine. That said, before Google’s IPO, there probably weren’t many expecting the company to launch driverless cars, futuristic augmented reality glasses or be involved in the mining of asteroids either.

    At least we know that Facebook does have engineers who are thinking about time travel, even if they’re all optimistic about the concept. We also know that the company hasn’t been shy about hiring away Google engineers.

    It could make Facebook Timelines a lot more interesting. Currently, Facebook will let you go back to 1000 A.D.

    Of course, Quora users were more interested in about ten other answers. The Facebook engineers’ posts only got 4 upvotes each. The top one, which comes (interestingly enough) from a former Facebooker – current Reddit CEO Yishan Wong – suggests that the time we’re living in just isn’t interesting enough for time travelers to frequent, compared to many of our planet’s other eras.

    Hat tip to MG Siegler for pointing out the Quora thread in a Tumblr link.

  • Quora Currency System Now Includes Promotion

    Quara has announced that users can now spend their credit to promote their content. Spending credits will allow users to broadcast to a larger audience. If it ia a promoted item it will appear with a special icon on the reader’s screens. So if you have something important to share, or a burning question, you can spend some credits and get your word out to a larger audience.

    If you haven’t used Quara before here’s a discretion of what they do from the Quara blog site:

    “Unlike traditional social networks, Quora gives you access to people who haven’t explicitly opted in to follow or friend you. This makes the product powerful, but it means that one person’s actions can affect many other people. Credits mediate the flow of information so that people aren’t overwhelmed by the increasingly vast number of other people who have access to them. This allows us to continue to build features that let you access large audiences and diverse groups of experts, and furthers our goal of connecting you with everything you want to know about.”

    The whole system of currency is based on your reputation. If you answer questions with clear articulate and knowledgable answers you earn credit. If simply mock people and provide no insight or clarification, your reputation will suffer and you will earn very little. I guess it’s social capital at its very finest. Anyhow, it costs capital to post questions and now, to promote questions to larger audiences. But, if it’s a subject or question that you really need addressed, it must be worth it.

    Here are some responses from users on the blog site about the addition of ‘pay for promotion’ at Quora:

    “One tiny thing you might wanna consider: if you’re requiring an expenditure of 50 credits to ask a question, perhaps make the slider cap out so the user is left with 50 credits.”

    Awesome. Thanks, Adam, for the announcement and a big thanks to the Team’s tireless efforts to make Quora a better place.

    “I think this is awesome. Promoting an answer has already got me two upvotes out of the blue. My only concern is that even at 100 credits, that would mean I need 10 upvotes to recuperate my costs and that’s a high number of upvotes for the average answer.”

    “It’s gambling. Spend some to promote a question with the hope or either getting more answers or upvotes. For those that want to play and really enjoy tracking the credits it’s a great feature. It’s going to change the nature of Quora more.”

    “I’m just a little worried that good questions from new (ie not power or “celebrity”) users will get buried by the whole commodity market of credits, and people with influence (ie people with lots and lots of credits) will be able to pack user feeds with posts and questions which are more relevant to them than to everyone else.”

    “Wow, 50 Credit cost to ask a question is HUGE! My gut reaction is that it will do a LOT to improve question quality on the site, as well as help reinforce the idea of questions being reusable.”

    So it sounds like people are generally excited about the addition of the new feature, but there is some concern too. I haven’t used Quora so I wonder if this new ‘pay for promotion’ could drown out some highly relevant or interesting topics or questions. If the whole point is gaining exposure to get feedback or answers, how does a new user gain enough clout, or credit to even make using Quora worth while? I would really be interested to know. I guess I should use Quora to find out.

  • Epic Photo Thread From Quora Is, Well, Epic

    There’s a thread on Quora right now that asks “What’s the most epic photo ever taken,” and some of the submissions are truly mind-blowing.

    Of course, in the many years of photography, people have captured an innumerable amount of iconic images. But the question is specific: what’s the most epic? User submissions prove that the concept of “epic” means something different to everybody. To some it means important, to others it means large scale, and to a few it simply means awesome.

    Although it’s virtually impossible for there to be a consensus on the most epic photo ever, this Quora thread is an amazingly fun read. I’ll give you a taste by presenting the top 10 epic photos, as currently voted by users.

    Want to feel small and insignificant? Here’s the Earth from about 3.7 billion miles away. This image was taken and transmitted by Voyager 1 about 13 years after its initial launch. If you want scope, here you go – it’s hard to get more epic than this. We’re that little spec – the single pixel on the right side of the image:

    User Mark Hughes says that his choice “encompasses a fundamental horror and truth about humanity today.” The image was taken during the 1993 famine in Sudan. Epic? Debatable. Heart-wrenching? Wow:

    Apollo 8’s snapshot of Earth from the Moon. ‘Nuff said:

    Historical significance is paramount in this classic photo taken at Tienanmen Square. One of the most iconic images of the 20th century:

    This image from the Hubble telescope is mind-warping. I’ll let user Phillip Schaffer describe why it’s so epic to him – “Background – as a pure act of curiosity, in 1995 the Hubble was aimed at a very small patch of sky thought to be empty. Data were added up over 10 days to make the image, and what was seen was a total surprise. The area was packed with galaxies. The size of the image below covers an area of sky the size of a dime viewed at 75 feet. Look at the number of galaxies and extrapolate that to the entire sky. Then multiply by perhaps a billion stars in each galaxy. Then make a rough estimate of the % of stars that might have intelligent life in their planetary system. I also never tire of just examining the variety of galaxies found in this picture. Every tiny smudge of light is an entire galaxy, possibly home to intelligent beings.”

    Another iconic image makes a play for most “epic” photo ever. This image of the immolation of a Buddhist monk won its photog, Malcolm Browne, the Pulitzer prize.

    This image captures three big events: On the left, fireworks. Barely visible in the middle is Comet McNaught. And on the far right, a thunderstorm. Pretty epic.

    High-fiving a whale. That is all:

    This photo was taken on September 11th at the World Trade Center. The photographer, Bill Biggart, was killed shortly after taking the photo. One Quora user writes, “Epic story, not epic photo.” What do you think?

    Finally, number 10 in Quora users’ minds is this National Geographic image of camels in the desert. It gets a little better when you realize the photo was taken from high above during a sunset and the black images are only shadows:

    What do you think of the picks by Quora users? What are you favorite images ever? Let us know in the comments.

    [Lead Image is #12 on the Quora thread – goodbye, sound barrier!]

    [Major Hat Tip to Google+ Chief Architect Yonatan Zunger for his Google+ post pointing me in the direction of this thread]

  • Quora Launches Boards Feature

    Quora, known primarily as a Q&A site, has launched a new feature to expand on this concept, and become more than strictly question-and-answer format. It’s called Boards.

    Essentially, Boards just lets you post whatever content you want on your profile. Of course, others can already follow you. As far as I can tell, it pretty much just makes Quora more social network (if it wasn’t already a social network).

    With Boards, users can write new posts, repost questions, answers, topics, etc. that already exist on Quora, and post links to anything on the web.

    “In this way, a board works like a lighter-weight version of a blog,” says Quora CEO and co-founder Adam D’Angelo. “But you can use them for organization, to make lists of things, as mailing lists, or anything else you want. You can add multiple authors to a board to make it collaborative. We support private boards as well.”

    “As a contributor, boards give you a context so you can focus your posts for the specific people who are interested in them,” he adds. “As a reader, boards let you control what you see in your feed with more granularity. You can follow boards in addition or instead of following people, letting you focus in on just what someone thinks about a specific subject, their profession, or one of their hobbies.”

    When a user follows a board, they get everything posted to that board in their feed. When a user createws a board, they can add any of their own followers to follow that board. Anytime you write an answer on Quora, you have the option to post it to a board.

    One of the main attractions to Quora has always been the people who use it. It has been embraced by numerous executives and product managers in the tech industry, who often share interesting bits of information or pieces of advice that are harder to come by from other sources.

  • All Facebook Employees Required To Have Facebook Accounts

    This may seem obvious, but all Facebook employees are required to have Facebook accounts. Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew “Boz” Bosworth confirmed as much on Quora.

    In response to the question: “Are there people at Facebook that do not have a Facebook account?” Bosworth responded:

    “No, our tools require that all employees have an account.”

    Bosworth has been fairly active on Quora, dropping nuggets about the company here and there. Another recent question he addressed was: “Are there any employees of Facebook that feel uneasy about their company’s success and its future, going into 2012, and would like to elaborate on it?”

    He said, “Probably not.”

    When a Quora user asked, “How many Facebook messages can I send to anyone or specific person per day?” he said:

    “There are no fixed limits. We have numerous safeguards against abuse which could limit you if your behavior appears to be spammy or unwanted and even those are adaptive so there is no set rule.”

    Anyone recall the guy who sued Facebook for $1.00 after being labeled a spammer by the company?

  • New York Times Crossword Puzzle Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs

    Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle is a special one. Sure, it was created by the man who holds the record for fewest black squares in a NYT puzzle, Quora engineer Kevin Der. With that in mind, that’s not what makes todays puzzle special, it’s the fact that the entire thing is a tribute to the late Steve Jobs. Der posted on Quora:

    “By now I’ve seen many ways people have chosen to remember Steve Jobs – posting his amazing Stanford commencement speech, describing how Steve inspired them personally, etc. Thinking about it now, I most admired the way Steve’s drive for perfection and willingness to boldly critique led to world changing products. It seemed like I might be able to honor Steve in a small but unique way – creating a tribute in the New York Times crossword puzzle.”

    It should be noted that another puzzle was scheduled to run today, and was already set up. Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times, was sent the tribute puzzle at 11:21 last night, and after thinking about it overnight, decided to run with Der’s puzzle. Here is Shortz’s account of how it went down:

    “Making a last-minute change like this isn’t easy. The puzzle that had been previously scheduled for tomorrow was already at The Times, laid out on the page, ready to be printed. The Arts section closes at 5 p.m., so the new puzzle needed to be edited, typeset, test-solved by three people, polished, and then sent to The Times before then.

    In addition, the old puzzle that was scheduled for AcrossLite and the puzzle applet both had to be replaced with the new puzzle — and the latter is handled in the Netherlands, which is six hours ahead of New York. Also, the “Wordplay” blog entry for tomorrow’s puzzle needed to be replaced, as did the file on XwordInfo.

    Unfortunately, it was too late to replace the old 10/7 crossword in tomorrow’s International Herald Tribune, which publishes the Times crosswords on the same day they appear in The Times itself. So I.H.T. readers will get a sneak peek at a crossword that now won’t appear in The Times for several more weeks.

    When all is said and done, I think the extra effort was worth it. Kevin made an outstanding puzzle honoring a truly great man.”

    If you’d like to give the puzzle a try, you can obtain a PDF version here.

  • Search Quality Should Trend Upward With Expert Content

    We talk about search quality a lot these days, particularly since the rise of content farms, and Google’s efforts to improve in light of them. While the quality of a search result isn’t always life or death, results for certain kinds of queries can indeed provide life-altering experiences for the user, depending on how they absorb the information that they’re given.

    Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that it is the user’s responsiblity to use critical thinking when searching the web for information. It’s often a good idea to look at multiple sources for a more complete takeaway. But the web is as good a place to spread misinformation as it is good information, and the search engines just can’t always tell the two apart. Unfortunately, humans can’t always either.

    This week, we looked at a new strategy Quora is taking in adding new legal and medical disclaimers, new policies for legal and medical questions/answers, and a new addition to its terms of service aimed at providing protection for doctors and lawyers who write answers.

    The move should encourage real professionals and experts to participate in spreading good information. This is the kind of content that should surface in search results – authoritative, with that authority made clear to the user.

    Experts contributing to Wikipedia could help too. Wikipedia, as you probably know, turns up high in Google results very frequently. It’s for this reason that Cancer Research UK is having its specialists conribute to Wikipedia to spread accurate information from people who truly know what they’re talking about.

    BBC News reports:

    Wikipedia said it had more than 3.5m page views for cancer-related content in January 2011.

    Henry Scowcroft, scientific communications manager for Cancer Research UK, said: “It has been our intention for a long time to be involved in the online discussion outside of our own website.”

    “Wikipedia is nearly always at the top of an internet search for cancers. It’s not always that easy to understand and sometimes it can be inaccurate or not completely up to date.”

    “Wikipedia is the 12th most popular website in the UK and accounts for just under 1% of all visits to websites made by UK Internet users,” says Robin Goad for Experian Hitwise. “In the last 12 weeks there were over 65,000 different search variations that included the word ‘cancer’ typed into search engines monitored by us here at Hitwise. Over 4,500 websites received traffic from those 65,000 cancer-related search terms, of which Wikipedia was the fourth most popular, receiving 4.38% of the search clicks.”

    Cancer Search Habits

    “Although Cancer Research UK actually receives more clicks than Wikipedia overall for all searches relating to cancer, this doesn’t take into account the fact that some of those searches will be navigational searches for ‘cancer research uk’ or similar terms,” adds Goad. “On top of that, Cancer Research UK receives 40% of its clicks from paid links, whereas Wikipedia receives its traffic almost exclusively from organic clicks.”

    Google still has work to do in the search quality area (probably why they’re hiring). They still have an old eHow article written by someone with no clear authority on the subject ranking number one for “level 4 brain cancer”, as we discussed well before the Panda update was even rolled out.

    Google and other search engines can only do so much though. Getting the real experts to contribute content is important. In fact, that’s why content is the most important part of SEO.

  • Quora Hires Facebook Recruiter

    Quora Hires Facebook Recruiter

    The growth rate of Quora (and we mean the actual company, not just the Q&A site) may soon increase at a rapid pace.  Quora has hired Andy Barton, a recruiter with an interesting resume, and presumably wants him to do more than turn away random applicants.

    A quick note on the current state of Barton’s professional network: as of this moment, he has four recommendations (good) and over 500 connections (way above average) on LinkedIn.

    Now let’s have a look at Barton’s background, since it’ll show the caliber of people he’s been in touch with before.  Most recently, Barton spent about four and a half years working for Facebook as its manager of technical recruiting, and it doesn’t get much more impressive than that.

    Yet from April of 2004 to April of 2005, Barton actually worked for Google as a recruitment consultant, which is something not a lot of people can say.  It’s hard enough to collect a paycheck from the search giant, never mind be named a gatekeeper.

    So Barton should be in contact with all sorts of skilled folks who are eager to work for a well-regarded tech company like Quora.  And he’s almost sure to put that fact to good use as Quora’s demands and payroll allow.

    Anyway, a hat tip goes to Alexia Tsotsis, who noted, “Quora currently has $11 million in funding and 21 employees but something tells me they’ll be expanding on both numbers sometime soon.”

  • Quora Changes Should Benefit Search for Medical, Legal Queries

    It looks as if Quora is bringing a new level of authority to its legal and medical-related content. This could end up being great for search, depending on how Google ranks the content.

    Quora announced the addition of new legal and medical disclaimers, new policies for legal and medical questions/answers, and a new addition to its terms of service aimed at providing protection for doctors and lawyers who write answers. The announcement says:

    This is an exclusive feature available only to licensed doctors and attorneys and law and medical students. Why only these users? Because these professionals have professional license-related constraints on their online behavior, including: (1) duties of confidentiality to clients & patients and (2) the obligation not to inadvertently create a client or patient relationship through contact on the Web. The intent of our new policies and disclaimer feature is to provide attorneys and doctors with as much protection as we can by making it absolutely clear to Quora users that doctors and lawyers who provide responses on Quora (1) are doing so only for informational purposes, (2) are not a particular user’s doctor or lawyer, and (3) should not be considered substitutes for actual consultations with lawyers or doctors.

    Some of our attorney and doctor users are already using disclaimers in their answers. Now these users can do so more efficiently and repeatably.

    The bottom line is that with these protections in place, actual qualified experts should be less hesitant about posting their knowledge, and therefore expand the amount of authoritative content. Combine that with Quora’s voting system, and users will be able to see how other legal and medical professionals react to the content.

    In a recent article, we compared the quality of content between Demand Media’s eHow and Quora. Quora seems to have a better reputation among the media crowd these days, but Demand Media continues to make moves to increase its overall quality, and Quora has plenty of the kinds of content that is often criticized on eHow.

    Legal and Medical are two categories where the authority of the information is of particular importance (as opposed to something like “how to tie a tie”). Decisions based upon legal or medical advice can have serious ramifications on people’s lives. This is why it has been troubling to see content from so-called content farms rank for these kinds of queries in Google, sometimes with no apparent authority behind the authors of the content.

    If this kind of authoritative content finds its way up in Google’s rankings, many of these concerns should be reduced. At the very least, it should help those seeking medical/legal advice who simply start their query at Quora itself.

  • Quora vs. eHow: Where’s the Better Quality?

    Quora vs. eHow: Where’s the Better Quality?

    Ok, the title is a trick question. There’s no concrete answer to this. You’ll find a mix of quality across both Quora and eHow. Furthermore, these sites are two different animals, but there is some overlap. Both sites have more than just how-to content, but both sites also have a great deal of how-to content.

    Have you had a better experience with content on Quora or on eHow? Let us know.

    It is this realization that led me to this piece to begin with. Browsing Quora, looking for some interesting conversations, I came across this one for, “How should you wash clothes?” Yes, that’s Quora, not eHow. The thread has actually been open since June of last year.

    Quora gets a lot of press for content about companies – people with direct knowledge of situations answering questions about said situations. Apparently it’s also a how-to site. Do a Quora search for “how to” and you will be inundated with search results. Among those, you’ll find some of the kinds of content Quora is more well-known for, but you’ll also find things like “How can I learn to love salads?”, “How do you learn to love yourself?”, “How is sunscreen thought to cause cancer?”, etc.

    Quora How To Results better than eHow?

    We’ve called out Google in the past for ranking apparently non-authoritative content from eHow for cancer related queries, so it seems only fair to address that last Quora example as well. Quora is not ranking high in Google’s results for that, and I have to wonder whether or not it was before the Panda update. That would be interesting to know.

    The top answer itself comes from someone who is following medical and cancer topics on Quora, but her bio does not appear to be present. It would be helpful for these types of answers to know something about the person who is answering. Is this person a doctor, for example? We don’t know. We just know that other Quora users (including co-founder Charlie Cheever in this case) liked the answer enough to vote it up. I wonder if Quora might be more useful with required bios. Of course, then the whole online anonymity debate comes into play.

    One interesting thing about Quora is that it had a feedback system built-in from the get go – something eHow has just implemented with its new redesign.

    eHow Helpful button - curation layer

    Quora answers are voted up or down by users, and there are links for “thank” and “not helpful”.

    Someone posted the question on Quora, “Is Quora trying to copy eHow?” but it has not been answered at this point. Seems like a good place for Quora’s founders to jump in.

    Your Quora experience is what you make of it. You choose the people and topics to follow, so if you’re a user, you can keep it at least somewhat relevant to your needs. We talked before about how Quora’s experience is about the content more than it is about the service itself. A lot of high profile people have had plenty of interesting things to say on Quora. The same could be said for Twitter and other services.

    In fact, the same can actually even be said for eHow, as it continues to make more partnerships to bring authoritative (or at least celebrity) voices to its content. It’s a different format, but again, there is some overlap.

    I find it interesting that Quora users seem to be churning out more and more of the kind of content that usually gets associated with content farms and alleged content farms – “how-to” stuff in particular.

    In some ways, one might even consider Quora a direct competitor to a site like eHow, but Quora isn’t dominating the search results the way eHow does. Of course, Quora’s model is not to create content based on what people are searching for. Quora starts with questions, and people answer those questions (some likely hoping to be found in search results as a result – not to get traffic per se, but at least to be viewed as an authority on a given subject).

    As far as who has the better quality, it depends on the topic, and it depends on your opinion. Google is certainly holding eHow in higher regard for the examples I’ve seen. Searching for “How should you wash clothes?” I see wikiHow ranking at the top, followed by eHow, and this is the exact title of the Quora piece, mind you (it’s not for wikiHow or eHow). The Quora result doesn’t even appear in the first ten pages.

    Should Quora results appear more for Google searches? Less? Tell us what you think.

  • Quora Visits Tripled Last Month

    Quora Visits Tripled Last Month

    According to the latest post on the Hitwise blog, the volume of visits to Quora nearly tripled in January due to considerable coverage from technology news websites. Below are highlights from the post:

    • Search has been the major driver of traffic of Quora over the past 6 months and accounted for nearly 49% of the visits last week.
       
    • Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter have also been key as users can share their both their questions and answers among their networks.
       
    • Among the visitors to website, the top 5 Mosaic segments represented 42% of all visits to Quora for the 12 weeks ending February 5, 2011.
       
    • The large share of the audience tends to be characterized by college-educated professionals, along with students poised to join those same segments following graduation.
       
    • For example, the largest segment currently visiting Quora is Major University Towns, which is primarily made up of students and young adults under the age of 35.
       
    • The Young Cosmopolitans segment is another strong segment for Quora, which tends to be the early adopters typically among the first to discover new websites.
  • Answers.com Sells For $127 Million

    Answers.com Sells For $127 Million

    Over the next few days, onlookers shouldn’t be surprised if the mix of questions on Answers.com begins to favor inquiries of the "what kind of ____ should I buy?" variety.  Fans may have some extra money coming to them, as Answers.com announced this morning that it’s being acquired for $127 million.

    AFCV Holdings, which is controlled by Summit Partners, is the organization that’s making the purchase.  And Summit Partners, if you’re interested, is a "growth equity investor" that’s backed Avast, B&W Loudspeakers, Belkin, Champion Windows, InstallShield, M-Audio, McAfee, Postini, and Tivoli Audio in the past.

    Summit Partners appears to have a lot of faith in Answers.com, too.  Bob Rosenschein, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Answers.com, explained in a statement, "The acquisition price of $10.50 per share represents a significant cash premium of approximately 33% over our 90-day volume-weighted average closing stock price."

    Rosenschein said as a result, "This is a great outcome for our shareholders.  After an exciting six years as a public company, we are very pleased to achieve considerable value for our investors."

    One other interesting point about all this: the move occurred despite all the recent talk about Quora.  So presumably Summit Partners doesn’t see the Q&A startup (or Facebook Questions, for that matter) as too much of a threat.

    The acquisition should close sometime in the second quarter of this year.

  • Data Credits Quora With 150 Percent Growth In January

    Quora, the Q&A site that bloggers and Silicon Valley early adopters can’t get enough of, is growing quickly, according to a new report.  Andrew Chen published some stats today showing that even a conservative estimate pegs the January growth rate at 150 percent.

    A little background info: Chen’s a blogger who’s worked as both an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures and a director of product marketing at Revenue Science.  He’s also a big Quora fan, writing, "My prediction for Quora is that it’s going to turn into a huge, important Internet property – it’ll break out of the Valley network easily and inevitably."

    As for the numbers, Chen pulled app data from both AllFacebook and AppData, and called his conclusions conservative since not everyone who visits Quora will register an account or sign in through Facebook.

    So on to the stats.  The subtitle on Chen’s blog post speaks of "150% growth in January, 160k monthly actives, 18k daily actives."  Later, he added, "As you can see from the graphs, Quora is growing on a very nice clip, over 2X larger in MAU over the last month."

    That’s good news for the site’s supporters.  Near-constant media attention will probably continue to feed that rise, and at this point, no serious problems (which might include spam, a decline in the quality of answers, or Twitter-like outages) have cropped up.

    We’ll try to continue to keep an eye on these stats in the months ahead.

  • Facebook Will Never Let You See Who’s Viewed Your Profile

    If you use Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered some app or some friend claiming they’ve found a way for you to see who has been viewing your profile. Chances are, it was a scam. 

    In fact, a few months ago, there were reports circulating about such scams. One in particular, security firm Sophos said attracted 60,000 clicks in just a few hours. Such scams still pop up from time to time. Your best bet is to ignore them, no matter how curious you are. 

    Facebook has acknowledged in the past that there is no way to view this information, but a post on Quora makes it pretty clear that there never will be a way either. 

    When someone asked the question: "Will Facebook ever offer a feature like LinkedIn’s, where you can see who has viewed your profile, Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth simply says:

    "No."

    Boz Answers Question about Facebook profile viewing

    From the sound of it, you probably have a better chance of seeing a Facebook-branded phone. 

    My advice to you is to only let people you want to see your profile be your friend on Facebook.

  • The Silly Quora Debate

    The Silly Quora Debate

    Over the past month or so there’s been an escalating amount of hype and discussion about Q&A startup Quora in the tech world. As a quick background, Quora was founded last year by former Facebook executives/engineers Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. It raised a nice round of venture capital at a really high valuation for a company that had yet to launch.

    Quora seemed to quickly live up to the hype though as the site launched into a private beta where it’s buzz began to build among Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, startup employees, investors, and journalists.

    I joined during this time period and immediately became hooked on participating in the Q&A discussions happening in some of my favorite topics that mostly hit well with Quora’s initial tech/business heavy userbase.

    The momentum has continued as Quora opened up, and the hype has gotten large with lots of coverage from blogs like Techcrunch to go along with proclamations from tech influencers like Robert Scoble being enamored with it, investor Shervin Pishevar saying it’s the “future of blogging”, and VC Mark Suster proclaiming it to be worth the high valuation it was given.

    Quora - What it is

    Like anything receiving a lot of praise, there of course has to be detractors. The comments on most of the Techcrunch articles are filled with people who bash Quora and say it’s overhyped, and now there are articles appearing that also question whether Quora can avoid the fate of Yahoo! Answers and other QA sites which have turned into “low quality sites” once they get big.

    Overall this debate is kind of interesting and fun to predict the future of a promising startup, but it’s also kind of silly. Let me explain why…

    First of all, it’s kind of humorous that people are pitching Yahoo! Answers as a worst-case scenario for Quora. That already shows that Quora has high hopes as Yahoo! Answers is one of the largest sites on the web. While the quality of questions there can be poor, there’s no denying that it’s gigantic. Many, many startups would kill to have that much traffic.

    Second, much of the debate assumes that Quora “wants to be the next Facebook or Twitter”. I’m not even sure what means. Does that mean a “big social company”? If we want to be that vague, then yes, Quora probably would like to be that, but it doesn’t have to be that much like those services to succeed, or even be close to as successful.

    If you read Quora’s About page, Wikipedia is really the most likely comparison for what Quora hopes to become or beat. There are obvious differences being that Quora is not a nonprofit, and it’s starting much later in the life of the web which gives Wikipedia a tremendously large head start.

    However, Quora also has some advantages of starting today and building a “knowledge product” that is built to be social from the ground up, designed better, and a more engaging and participatory experience for a larger number of people. From what I’ve heard, Wikipedia has only a few thousand users who actually edit. It seems possible that Quora could beat that number simply from being a more engaging and social tool.

    Quora can also think from the start about how to handle spam, fake user accounts, and many of the problems people are predicting they will have as the service grows. It’s naive to think that Quora hasn’t been aware of those problems and thinking about them from the start.

    I’m even speculating though on what Quora wants to become. Most of them change dramatically over time, so Quora might end up to be another complete social network with photo and video sharing for all we know at this point.

    Let’s give Quora some breathing room to grow up a little bit and see what they grow into. My bet is that it will continue to be quite good and interesting.

    Let the debate rage on.

    *Originally published at ConversionRater

  • Are Businesses Using Instagram and Quora to Engage?

    I pay attention to emerging technology and trends on a daily basis. While I track many networks, tools, and services, I take the time to share those that appear to gain traction or offer interesting prospects for tomorrow’s business, today.

    Two such services are quickly becoming the darlings of the blogosphere and brands alike, Instagram and Quora. Not a day passes us by where someone isn’t analyzing Instagram’s rise to imaging stardom or Quora’s domination of social engagement around questions and answers. Did the world need another imaging application? Probably not. Do consumers need another question and answer site? Hardly. Instagram and Quora, however, appear to have executed a “thin edge of the wedge” strategy, which is akin to the “tip of the spear” strategy where the services attack a small problem first and then expand once traction and momentum are underway.

    Instagram wasn’t the first service to help you share pictures from your mobile device to your social graph. Services such as Twitpic and yfrog connected pictures to the Twitter stream. With Facebook’s mobile app, users could simply upload pictures to their Wall. Instagram however, solved two small challenges with an all-in-one app. It became the focal point of visual sharing. Rather than take a picture and then upload socially through a separate service, Instagram became the dashboard for capturing, editing, and sharing the image without leaving the app. And, Instagram served as an integrated distribution network connecting users to their respective egosystem including, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, Facebook, and Foursquare. The answer to what’s next lies in the company’s business plan, most likely described as the wedge strategy. Or, the answer could already exist in Quora, the social Q&A network.

    Quora seems to baffle the sharpest of the pundits. Essentially it is a question and answer network, not unlike Yahoo Answers or Mahalo Answers. But, the fledgling service solved a couple of problems very well that existing solutions and budding entrepreneurs neglected to see. Much in the same way Foursquare applied game mechanics into geolocation and Facebook introduced the social effect into the News Feed, Quora is designed to engage, challenge, educate and reward its users. But that’s not all. The foundation for the questions and answers are driven by a hierarchy and social ranking, much like Twitter and blogs. The number of followers, following and total mentions is prominent for all to see and judge.

    Quora evokes the essence of social capitalism and in the process, introduced a new category of content creators. The system was initially closed, and through a strategic round of private beta invitations, the early rounds of users such as digerati, silicon valley elite, bloggers, celebrities, et al, set the stage for exclusivity as well as focus. Those on the outside wanted in and those on the inside desired recognition. I am not name dropping, but I am making a point. I was introduced to Quora by Ashton Kutcher. And, when I sat down recently to discuss Quora with uber blogger Robert Scoble, his response was as telling as it was validating, Quora is hot because, “all of the cool kids are using it.”

    The thin wedge of Quora’s strategy may already have traveled further from the left to the right than Instagram. As new users are invited into Quora, the game mechanics seem to only grow in prominence. People are investing in asking and more so, answering questions to boost social capital in an uncharted and unconquered network where the reward is distinction and stature.

     

    Are Businesses Using Instagram and Quora to #Engage?

    If it’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years of studying social media, business, and the pursuit of influence, it’s that we are competing for the moment in order to earn and maintain a semblance of relevance. For businesses struggling to gain traction through Likes, RT’s, comments, clicks, friend and follower counts, the moment for which we compete, never really comes. It is perpetual.

    The reality is this, Quora and Instagram are inviting participation among brands as they experiment in earning relevance.

    #Quora

    While brands are currently not invited to the Quora party, listening and monitoring are important within Quora if it is indeed where your community is asking and answering questions. Like Yahoo Answers and Mahalo Answers, answers to brand related questions are already populating the top of search results in Google.

    Brands, if possible, can follow topics related not only to their company, but also their markets. For example, there are hundreds of questions related to Apple in Quora right now, 335 of which are open. If we take a subset of Apple’s business and follow the topic around “tablets,” we would see that our time (defined by any number of tablet manufactures) would yield a great deal of insight.

    But why Quora? Robert Scoble eluded to the value of the network earlier. The community as it exists today is rich with influencers. Their perspective is worthy of attention. If for nothing else, insight into the perception and experiences of noteworthy individuals can help inspire future experiences through adaptation.

    By the way, if you want to continue the conversation on this topic, it should come as no surprise, that a question already exists…and it’s awaiting your response.

    #Instagram

    On the other hand, Instagram is already attracting brands into the popular mobile imaging network to help visualize their stories. In November of 2010, National Geographic was amongst the first to demonstrate how a brand’s image could quite literally tie to images within a mobile photo sharing  network bound by imagery.

    Since then, CNN, Grammys, NPR, NBC News, Playboy, and Pepsi signed up for Instagram. When Starbucks introduced its new logo recently, the company did not wish to repeat the Gap’s social backlash. Instead, Starbucks shared the logo across the social Web, Instagram included, to seek feedback.

     NPR uses Instagram to not only extend the reach of its stories, but also tell stories through modern form of photojournalism. In fact, media certainly has a play here and in any other active imaging network.

    To learn more about brands using Instragram, you might want to watch this thread as it unfolds on, you guessed it, Quora.

    We’re early on both fronts, but these trends are inciting notable activity on both sides of the brand equation. It’s not just businesses that gain from the intelligence and community within each network, media organizations can also keep their fingers on the pulse of not just new, but also emerging networks that can modernize and reinvigorate news distribution networks.

    The networks that gain greatest prominence in these times are those that people choose to support. As such, it is up to businesses and organizations with a story to tell and those with true intentions of community to survey the horizons for the next opportunity to earn relevance.

     

    Originally published on BrianSolis.com

  • Is New Ask Feature a Response to Growing Interest in Quora?

    Ask announced today that it is rolling out the ability to personalize the Q&A experience, which has become the core focus of the site. 

    Ask users can use the "Browse by Interests" tab to view questions/answers (content) that are relevant to them, which should make the experience a great deal more useful. 

    "This personalized experience is part of our larger vision for what Ask.com Q&A is about" says Director of Product Management Jason Rupp. "First, if the answer already exists on the Web and you can get it in milliseconds without bugging a single person, we should give it to you. Second, if you do need a person to answer, we should optimize the chances of you getting a high quality answer – quickly – as well as make it easy and fun to ask subsequent questions."

    "From a feature standpoint, that means things like intelligent routing so your question is delivered to the people most qualified to answer it first," adds Rupp. "The ability to follow people who consistently provide highly relevant questions and answers on the site also helps you customize your experience. And now, the ability to filter your experience to reflect the questions and answers most pertinent to your life takes that one step further."

    How To Personalize Browse Q&A on Ask.com from askdotcom on Vimeo.

    Another Q&A site called Quora has been getting a great deal of attention lately, and one of its features is the ability to follow topics as well as people. This new feature would appear to be following this concept, but Ask’s feature lets users grab profile info from other social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn to personalize the Interests they’re following. 

    The biggest draw to Quora thus far has been the quality of the content –  the caliber of people answering the questions. CEOs and other company executives, for example, have been answering questions, providing authoritative information. 

    As with any site, the quality of Ask’s new features will only be as good as the content that is available. Part of that is up to the user and what they choose to follow. Given that Ask is looking to the web (not just people) for answers, it should be pretty useful.

  • How Will Quora Handle Being Both Twitter and Wikipedia?

    You’ve probably noticed that Quora has been getting a lot of press here in early 2011. As a result, the site is getting a lot of new users. As a result of that, there is growing concern that Quora will have a hard time maintaining the level of quality that led to it getting all the press in the first place. 

    Quora is a kind of Q&A site, and that quality comes from the actual people who have been answering the questions (and sometimes from those asking them). The fear is that too many people will start using it, and either the quality answers will get lost in a sea of lesser-quality answers or that the real experts (in many cases execs of high profile companies) will stop using it. 

    Some have gone so far as to suggest that Quora could be the next Twitter, simply in terms of being the next big social hit, but aside from the obvious differences between Quora and Twitter in terms of functionality, there are some big differences in how they are run. 

    Quora is largely based around strict guidelines in order to maintain quality, whereas with Twitter, pretty much everything goes. Twitter has terms of use, but they’re not nearly as restrictive. If I want to tweet, "I had some pancakes today and they were da bomb." or something stupid like that (not that I would), I could do so, and Twitter would be fine with it, because it’s all about freedom of expression and whatnot. On Quora, asking a question like "Who ate the bombest pancakes today?" would likely be heavily frowned upon. 

    Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever addressed the concerns of potentially diminishing quality at the site today (hat tip to MG Siegler), saying, "We’re deeply committed to making Quora a resource full of high quality content, and so we’re doing a bunch of different things to maintain that. This isn’t an easy problem at all, and the solution isn’t going to be one big change that makes everything perfect; it’s going to take a lot of little things that add up and make a difference."

    There’s certainly room for improvement so far, if quality is the name of the game:

    Quora's Quality Control

    "One thing we’re trying to do a better job ASAP on is educating the new users that join the site and getting them up to speed on the policies, guidelines, and conventions as quickly as possible. Yesterday, we added a quick tutorial quiz before a user posts his/her first question."

    In the coming months, Cheever said Quora will be "heavily investing engineering effort" in:

    – Educating new users about site policies and guidelines

    – Improving the feed and voting ranking mechanisms

    – Changing the core product to accommodate a Quora with many more users and many more questions and answers and topics

    – Building special tools to support the efforts of reviewers and admins to improve the site and maintain civility and generally make it more fun to make Quora better

    Again, while Twitter and Quora may be very different products, and serve generally different purposes, perhaps a real solution, beyond guidelines and policies for Quora, would be in APIs, third-party apps, and more freedom (granted, they do have APIs, and I’m sure we’ll see more apps developed as time goes on). 

    Twitter has long been criticized for excessive noise, but part of the beauty of Twitter is that Twitter doesn’t tell you how you are supposed to use it. In fact, Twitter thrives on how users decide they want to use it. The "retweet" started as a user phenomenon, and grew to be an official feature of the service, for example. Twitter has APIs, which have allowed developers to create apps that users take advantage of to make the service more useful to them – to fit their specific needs for the service. 

    Quora appears to be taking more of a Wikipedia (review and strict policy) approach, and maybe that’s the right thing (Wikipedia is a very valuable and popular site for information), but Quora is inherently a more social service than Wikipedia, which could make this model difficult in the long run (and as Cheever noted, it already is difficult). Quora has elements of both Twitter and Wikipedia, not to mention Facebook, Digg, Yahoo Answers, and other existing sites.  Is Quora trying to be too many things at once? Maybe. Maybe not. 

    Clearly Quora is onto something, as it has managed to get this far and draw real quality content from users who other people want to follow. This could be one of the most interesting sites to watch over the course of the year. Will it be able to maintain both growth and the integrity that inspired that growth from the get go? 

    In the end, as discussed in a previous article, it’s really all about the content, so if the interesting content ceases, so will the interest, and likely the growth. Twitter has managed to keep providing interesting content, based on who is tweeting it, even among all the noise. What if tweets on Twitter were edited by the community like Wikipedia? On the flipside, what if Wikipedia had non-stop noise coming in from all angles, like Twitter. We can probably agree that both Twitter and Wikipedia would be less helpful in these cases. The interesting thing is that Quora is somewhat a combination of these two, watching these elements work with or against each other will be something to see.

  • Will Quora Go Mainstream?

    Will Quora Go Mainstream?

    Recently, I have had an influx of Quora friend requests in my inbox. Honestly, I have not seen so many social media experts flock to a social media web site since all of my social media and search engine marketing buddies flocked to Twitter. So, I started my quest to find out exactly if Quora.com is the next social media web site to go mainstream.

    When I first went to Quora.com to check it out in order to write about Quora, I was not quite sure what I was looking at. The interface for Quora.com is a very simple, and basic design consisting of a few fill in the blank lines where you can log in. Not much else to let you know what the site is about. After you sign up for an account, things are still kept very basic. After playing around on the site, and putting in keywords, you come to realize that Quora.com is a platform where people can ask and answer questions – very similar to Yahoo! Answers. The main difference between Yahoo! Answers and Quora.com is that Quora.com has a much more serious tone to it than Yahoo! Answers (even in the sections asking questions about social games, and video games).

    Once you have logged in to the site, you can type in keywords to find questions on subjects that you would like to help answer. If you need a question answered, then you can type in questions as well. The search bar even gives you suggestions as you type if you’re not quite sure what subject your keywords would fall under. The keyword suggestions are also great for finding out which questions have already been asked that relate to your keywords.

    I did a few tests, and found that if I check on keywords for rather serious topics such as the presidency, or the arms race, there were many questions to chose from to find out more information on those topics. However, if I chose a less serious topic such as “bed intruder”, there were a few questions regarding it, but nothing worth writing about. For questions that are borderline between serious and not so serious (like social gaming), there was a mix of questions asking how to better market a social game along with questions pertaining to favorite social games, and top scores. Granted, you only get what you give, but I could definitely tell that not many people were wanting to explore social gaming on a social level – ironically.

    Some of the pluses for this site: if you have any serious questions that you would like to ask, you are more likely to get a serious answer to your answer here than on Yahoo! Answers. On the other side, if you are looking for something more light-hearted (ex: looking for a place to chat with others about fun online games to play), then this may not be the place for you. Overall, if you’re looking to show yourself as an expert in a particular field of knowledge then answering questions on this site would be a good way to go. As far as asking questions goes, it is probably best to stick with questions that you sincerely need an answer to (those looking for a good party game site need not apply).

    Originally published on billhartzer.com

  • Foursquare CEO Has Plenty of Advice for Entrepreneurs

    Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley likes to lend advice to entrepreneurs. A quick glance at his Quora activity makes this pretty clear pretty fast. In fact, this is a perfect example of why Quora has been covered in the press so much lately, as a valuable source of content. 

    On Quora, someone asked, "What is the process involved in launching a startup at SXSW?" It’s a great question that many entrepreneurs have no doubt asked themselves, and are currently asking themselves as the huge event, in Austin Texas draws near (March 11-20). 

    Dennis Crowley, Fousquare CEO gives advice to entrepreneursCrowley is a great person to answer the question, having launched Foursquare at the event in 2009, only to have it blow up and become the poster child for a whole sector of the social media and mobile app landscapes – the location-based service. 

    In a nutshell, in case you’re wondering, Crowley’s advice is to "hustle to get something built," tell people (friends and strangers) about it, search for what people are saying about your product on Twitter and respond as much as possible, set up a forum dedicated to the product, and have someone at home keeping an eye on things while you’re busy at the event. 

    As alluded to, Crowley has given advice to entrepreneurs (via Quora) in the past. Back in November, he gave 6 "pieces of advice for entrepreneurs" in general:

    1. Stop sketching and start building
    2. Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work
    3. Build early and often
    4. Don’t let a lack of technology get in the way
    5. Hire the best people you can find
    6. Don’t get distracted

    He elaborated on each of these, but you get the idea. 

    When asked last month, what drove him to become an entrepreneur, Crowley said, "Never really started foursquare (or dodgeball) for the sake of starting a company… we just built things we wanted to use with our friends and the rest just kind of happened." 

    That might be Crowley’s most important lesson of all. 

    Crowley recently made the cover of the 2011 Trends Issue of Entrepreneur Magazine.