Racing to Fill Gaps Left by Google | Hacker News Reader

Racing to Fill Gaps Left by Google

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39 pointshenry_flower39 comments

meh.

I waited for an invitation for 6 weeks and when I finally got it, I was required to login via twitter or facebook. I dropped it right then and there.

why?

Twitter logins I don't mind, but I dislike FB enough to avoid logging in there or maintaining my account there (beyond specifying in my bio that I don't really use FB). I've never used FB connect for anything. shrug

Many of the people I invited to Quora felt this way, this was when FB was the only option.

One thing to note is that after you login, you can disconnect your twitter and/or facebook account. I disconnected FB.

Even if you don't plan to join, I would recommend the HN crowd to check out some of the questions under startups -- excellent info.

I guess in the future, you are going to need to create "throwaway" facebook accounts to sign up for new/ untrusted services in the same way you need a "throwaway" email address today.

That seems like a hassle to me and will make me significantly less likely to sign up for anything, but maybe most people really don't care.

I'm really not fond of this trend of using Facebook logins for everything. Why not OpenID or similar? Whenever something asks for a Facebook login, I immediately decide not to use it.

I liked OpenID until I had to implement it for a site. Now I stay away from it (as a developer).

Everyone's OpenID is a bit different and I ended up with a lowest common denominator approach which was suboptimal in my opinion.

I have been using it for a while now.

1) It feels a little like the LinkedIn discussion groups.

2) It will most probably be used for self-promotion more than anything else.

3) It will have a hard time competing with the quality of HN, SO and the rest of the Stack Exchange network.

I don't care about whether they use Twitter and FB for login. In fact that is what I liked about it.

What's with all the negativity around here? It's easy to look at a product, have several quick gut reactions, and then simply write it off. For all the open-minded-ness that the HN community prides itself on, it certainly doesn't seem to be showing through in the comments here so far.

In my opinion, Quora deserves more careful consideration and suspension of judgment for a variety of reasons:

1. Quality of community - Quora has managed to assemble an incredibly high quality set of founders, VCs, angels, hackers as extremely active members of the community. These are probably some of the busiest and hardest to engage and please people, and yet Quora has been able to elicit extremely candid and detailed responses from them about topics unseen anywhere else. The breadth and depth of information in some of these posts dwarf all the random Mixergy, Founders At Work, etc interviews seen here on HN. For one example, search for answers by Reid Hoffman, cofounder of PayPal and LinkedIn.

2. Amazing UI/UX design. There are so many clever small details to the user experience that it is impossible to really understand without actually getting your hands dirty and trying the product.

3. Pedigree - Cofounders Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever were former CTO/VP Engineering and Head of Connect/Platform at Facebook, respectively. They've managed to secure a massive investment at a huge valuation from a very highly-regarded VC firm - before launch. Regardless of how much confidence you put in these signals, they are meaningful enough to warrant some suspension of judgment.

4. No one cares that you won't connect with Facebook or Twitter. Most people aren't like you. And if you really are interested in "building things people want," you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is the direction the web is moving in. I don't like Facebook's cavalier attitude toward privacy, but I'm willing to connect to Quora to see a great product and community in action. The potential for learning greatly outweighs any philosophical stance for me.

Obviously, there are a lot of unstated assumptions underlying these points, so I'll add the caveat that if none of the above appeals to your sense of curiosity, then maybe Quora really isn't for you. But I just wanted to balance all the negative comments so that someone that would enjoy Quora doesn't get turned off by all the "meh".

" No one cares that you won't connect with Facebook or Twitter. Most people aren't like you. And if you really are interested in "building things people want," you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that this is the direction the web is moving in. I don't like Facebook's cavalier attitude toward privacy, but I'm willing to connect to Quora to see a great product and community in action. "

In other words you don't mind using Facebook or Twitter to log onto Quora and you want to slag people who do and want them to have to "come to terms" with your attitude. Way to go. If "no one cares" why are you making such a song and dance about it here?

The rest of your arguments exhibit appeal to authority than any compelling rationale.

"The breadth and depth of information in some of these posts dwarf all the random Mixergy, Founders At Work, etc interviews seen here on HN. For one example, search for answers by Reid Hoffman, cofounder of PayPal and LinkedIn"

Wow All of them!! Amazing ! Why didn't you throw in Wikipedia and the sum total of business knowledge accumulated by mankind while you are at it? Hyperbole anyone?.

" Amazing UI/UX design. There are so many clever small details to the user experience that it is impossible to really understand without actually getting your hands dirty and trying the product."

In other words you don't want to point out anything specifically amazing. Only you "really understand" the genius and anyone who disagrees on something even peripherally related is in the wrong and "close minded". Your gut reaction about the UI which can't be articulated is evidence of depth of perception , but when other people have gut reactions to method of registering, it is to be dismissed. Sheesh!

"Pedigree - Cofounders Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever were former CTO/VP Engineering and Head of Connect/Platform at Facebook, respectively. They've managed to secure a massive investment at a huge valuation from a very highly-regarded VC firm - before launch."

None of this has anything to do with eventual success or failure of a product or startup. But you cover your tracks nicely with the "regardless of what you think of such signals, I am right anyway" bit

My points above are not meant to convince you that Quora is good, but that it is worth checking out. It was in response to comments like 'I saw connect with FB and bounced.'

Appeals to authority and hyperbole are rhetorical devices used to accomplish a goal, which here, is to convince people who are reading all the "meh" comments to give Quora a legitimate look. It's interesting that you feel the need to crusade against a pretty harmless opinion post.

"In other words you don't mind using Facebook or Twitter to log onto Quora and you want to slag people who do and want them to have to "come to terms" with your attitude. Way to go. If "no one cares" why are you making such a song and dance about it here?"

No. The fact that lots of people don't mind connecting with Facebook and Twitter means that if you want to build products for those people, you have to come to terms with that.

And like I said in the paragraph right below, if that doesn't resonate with you, then feel free to ignore it. It's OK if you're not building stuff for "normals".

"Appeals to authority and hyperbole are rhetorical devices used to accomplish a goal ... "

I rest my case.

I completely agree. Most people dont really care about logging in with Facebook/Twitter. For the HN crowd, you can disconnect your related FB/twitter profile after you register if you want.

Eh. None of your points move me. In particular:

"Quora has managed to assemble an incredibly high quality set of founders, VCs, angels, hackers as extremely active members of the community."

Anyone who has been around HN or Reddit for a while will tell you that the hard part is maintaining an intelligent level of dialogue, in the face of the massive crowd of mouth-breathers that come with open adoption. It remains to be seen what will happen to Quora's signal-to-noise ratio if it becomes popular. And if it doesn't become popular, the value is a huge question.

"Cofounders Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever were former CTO/VP Engineering and Head of Connect/Platform at Facebook, respectively. They've managed to secure a massive investment at a huge valuation from a very highly-regarded VC firm - before launch."

This is practically a truism. In any case, it's not as informative a signal as it sounds -- people with successful pedigrees have an easier time raising money. It's hard to disambiguate this effect from the promise of the product itself.

" No one cares that you won't connect with Facebook or Twitter. Most people aren't like you."

Indeed. I am far more likely than the average person to try out a new service, if it's useful. Yet, with Quora, I am not compelled. I have no need for the service it provides.

Fair enough, but I think the negative comments to which you are reacting are a backlash against a company that's already quite well-hyped (at least in the Valley). In other words, those comments are the balance -- to a tidal wave of Valley echo-chamber publicity.

Interesting site, first time I'd played with it . . .

My immediate impression was:

a) Brilliantly simple user interface.

b) I will likely never go there to use it, but bet I start finding their results via Google.

If the idea behind linking via facebook/twitter was to make things easier for users - that's a mistake. There are people who already are sensitive about their info on facebook - I bet they wouldn't like to expose it to yet another fledgling website with its own privacy fine print on what it can do with that info. I wonder if this is a surrogate attempt at privacy violation by facebook itself.

"In March, investors—led by Benchmark Capital—invested $14 million in Quora at a valuation of around $87.5 million, say people familiar with the matter."

3 months before going public, already worth ~$87.5 million?

"Quora's business model is currently unclear. [co-founder] Mr. D'Angelo ... said "if I had to guess, it would probably involve some kind of advertising at some point."

I guess they are banking on people being attracted to the clean and businesslike interface over the long term. There are already many Q&A websites & subsites, but they are variously overrun by trolls or too gimmicky, with cartoonish avatars and suchlike.

Consider that Google was a late entrant into the search engine market; back in the day I used to use Altavista, Lycos and Yahoo, but all three were highly variable in terms of result quality and loaded slowly due to an excess of visual junk (because everyone thought success lay in gathering users to a portal). One day I visited Google and that was that. When they finally did introduce advertising, they made it subordinate to their own visual branding so few people found it very intrusive. My guess is that quote is trying to do something similar by establishing itself as the 'pro' solution in this niche and focusing on the creation of a persistent user base rather than seeking early revenue.

I'm not feeling it, though.

Clickable: http://www.quora.com

Also, the site requires you to have a FB or twitter account. Anyone know if users that don't have either will still be able to access the site?

That's a deal-breaker for me; I don't use Facebook, and I don't link my Twitter account except in exceptional circumstances.

I suspect I'm not the target demographic, though.

You can view content on the site without an account, but you need to use Twitter or Facebook to create an account right now and edit anything. We might change this later.

Ok So I've been looking at various questions on Machine Learning and I don't find anything mind blowing or that I can't find elsewhere. (You can read answers without joining up, which is a blessing Damned if I'll sign up with Facebook or Twitter). Nor do I find any otherwise un-encounterable people or opinions.

Maybe it works better for non technical stuff like business plans or marketing advice ? Can someone point to a specific "can't find this quality elsewhere" answer? Thanks in advance.

What is the best advice for a startup applying to Y Combinator? http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-advice-for-a-startup-a...

Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc. http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Quora-use-MySQL-as-the-data-st....

Why did so many successful entrepreneurs and startups come out of Paypal? http://www.quora.com/Why-did-so-many-successful-entrepreneur...

What were the 4 or 5 key decisions that Larry Page and Sergey Brin made in the early days of Google? http://www.quora.com/What-were-the-4-or-5-key-decisions-that...

Why has FarmVille been so explosively successful http://www.quora.com/Why-has-FarmVille-been-so-explosively-s...

What was the interview process like during the early days of PayPal? http://www.quora.com/What-was-the-interview-process-like-dur...

Does anyone have any experience with old media launches like this?

My assumption is you don't get in the WSJ (or any widely-circulated publication for that matter) unless you have a PR company or the right connections. Is it really more than just having something cool to hang on the wall?

Why don't you ask the question on Quora?

What I've observed is: you have to be on the radar of the reporter somehow; PR firms can help but other buzz/connections are just as important. Helping the reporter with the right kind of quotes, supporting interviews, framing that helps the story seem like an interesting trend, etc. makes coverage more likely and better.

(For example, the WSJ article's major news hook is Quora's opening, but that's presented as part of a trend, "[Startups] Racing to Fill Gaps Left by Google". Many outlets would want to cover Quora's opening, but by giving the WSJ a little early notice of the change, and interviews with the founders, and pointers to some outsiders who could provide good 'reax' quotes, media-savvy startups can ensure a meaty story in a marquee publication.)

Stories in a mass-market paper can drive a lot of traffic, and traffic that's usefully different (or more mainstream) than other avenues. A positive mention by a big-name reviewer (Mossberg, Pogue, etc.) is gold.

(edit: parenthetical 2nd para added)

I've been using Quora for a few months and I have found it VERY useful. Mainly due to the quality of answers being far better than anything found in a simple Google Search. Also, the user base is very transparent. There are many influential web users on the site with plenty of good knowledge to share. The fact that you can ask a question to a user without being their friend is also helpful. With the release to the public, I fear that the quality of questions and answers will fall to something similar to that of Yahoo Answers. Let's hope not.

For those that want to try it without logging in, go to the login page ( http://www.quora.com/login/index ) and the search box will be available at the top

>which have sought to build search-like question and answering services that rely on what people say is important, not just machines.

Google's PageRank algorithm is based entirely on what people say is important.

No this not a gap left by Google. They tried Google Answers and they shut it down. Its a tough nut to crack.

It will be interesting to see what happens Re: the community now that it opens up. Right now, Quora's usefullness is somewhat limited (most users are in SF/NY and tech-oriented) but most of the answers are well thought-out and of good quality. User growth is a double-edged sword

A few days ago I declared Quora to be Yahoo! Answers for grown ups. I stand by that definition.

You may need a Facebook or Twitter account to create an account, but you log in with separate Quora credentials. The purpose of the FB and Twitter integrations is so that other users can see the social proof of your credentials and credibility.

If there is another way to sign up, I can't find it. That's a turn off considering I don't want to use my facebook account or twitter anymore.

http://www.quora.com/Magnets-How-do-they-work?

Q&A sites are more a community-building problem instead of a technology problem. Quora's only chance at success will be with building a good community.

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