Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?
scobleizer.com
scobleizer.com
Long answer: there is (IMHO) absolutely nothing innovative about Quora in terms of technology or concept. It's a Q&A site. No more, no less.
The only noteworthy thing about Quora is the marketing success in all the Valley insiders they've gotten to use it.
Also, what breathtaking technology innovation have they produced?
all the Valley insiders they've gotten to use it.* They are the first Q&A site I've seen that is completely personalised - you only see questions that are either followed by your social graph or apply to the topics you have selected.
* Questions are owned by the community, not the person who asked the question. It's actually pretty hard to figure out who asked a question in the first place, and other people can improve the wording, apply topics etc.
* They don't use a dumb points or badges based incentive system. Instead, their incentives are much more subtle - it's all about seeing how your peers respond to your interactions. The "thanks" button is a lovely example of this.
In 2002, would you have said "There's nothing innovative about Google in terms of technology or concept. It's a search engine. No more, no less." ?
But I don't think they're a "blogging" innovation. That's just a catchy headline.
They might not be themselves differentiators, but they are indicators of a differentiated understanding of how to design a good Q & A site that elicits high quality content from high quality contributers.
Technology is no longer the only differentiator. We've moved far enough "up the stack" that there are lots of ways to differentiate in consumer internet beyond better algorithms.
Do Craigslist, Facebook, or Twitter have anything that's, in your opinion, "differentiated"?
Facebook definitely started with the network effect. It was far technically inferior to Myspace and Friendster when I first signed up.
I only joined because of the exclusive feel which soon changed when they branched out. Many of my colleagues and I have said we never would have made a Facebook account if it was public like it is now.
To me, most of the points that Scoble mentions are a result of the quality of community. None of those features would matter if there weren't engaging people and discussions on the site. As to whether Quora made the community, or the community made Quora, I don't know enough to say.
This is not to say that Quora doesn't add any other value.
One recurring problem in creating real-time web applications is how to sync the display between browser windows/tabs amongst different users (and of the same user).
You can render the page, stream compact JSON data to the browser, and use the data to update the page with javascript. However, doing so likely require you to duplicate your server-side templates on the client-side. You can, of course, avoid duplicating your template code by only implementing them on the client-side. However, doing so will hurt your site's SEO because your webserver would now generate JSON data instead of rendered HTML that search engines understand.
Duplicating template code increases complexity while removing duplicate code using client-side-only templates hurts SEO. This is the problem that Quora solved. Instead of streaming compact JSON data, Quora streams rendered HTML that updates any part of the page (not just a section of the page).
From an answer Charlie wrote: "If I were making a new website from scratch without LiveNode, the first thing I would do would be to rebuild LiveNode. Pretty much everything about web development is easier and faster and more correct using it." [2]
One of Abert's (Quora Engineer) tweets: "Going back to Django after having used Livenode is just painful." [3]
More info:
[1] http://www.quora.com/Quora-Infrastructure/What-is-webnode2
[2] http://www.quora.com/What-limitations-has-Quora-encountered-...
No, it's like a forum.
Not that Quora isn't interesting/useful/cool, but need we have a meta discussion about how revolutionary every new product is?
It's like the Valley is turning into something like the more extreme parts of the fashion world: generating it's own excitement and obsolescence in a way wholly disconnected from the quality and utility of the actual products.
For the rest of the world, I don't think it is. I'm waiting for people outside the tech sector of the Bay Area to start using it.
Quora and StackOverflow might have improved the traditional Q&A site by making it more about conversations than just "HOW DO I GET BABBY" questions, but it's not blogging. Blogging is more about writing about what's on your mind. In some cases your blog entries are part of a conversation, but it's at the same level that a newspaper editorial is part of a conversation.
I rejected using Quora twice before I finally saw an explanation of how to search there.
I rarely want to ask questions, I often want to search. They've flipped the priority of those two things in the UI.
I thought the search field was the input field for the 'Add Question' button too. I finally found out when complaining in IRC that Quora didn't have a search.
However, it was pretty much noise. The specific questions asked were fun, but not something I would like to spend any significant time dedicated to either answering or reading about.
That being said, with the rise fo Twitter, many people stopped blogging. I can see how this might get people to write something more meaningful and longer than 140 characters again...and since they are "hanging out" with an people they already have some interest in, it might work.
Interestingly, I think it almost fails as a Q&A site on first glance b/c the search seems so horrific.
Will I go back? Probably not. I would rather still use Google, which has better search, and see Quora in that feed.
Will other people create content for Quora, thereby creating value for Quora? Yes, undoubtedly. It happened with Mahalo, Stack Overflow and Digg/Reddit...it will happen here. To the scale Quora needs? Not sure. Depends if Google picks them up and if they open up to third party tools ala Twitter.
Is it the future of blogging? Probably not.
Counting that as an innovation to blogging seems too far-fetched...
Longer answer:
What exactly is a 'blogging innovation'? Something that helps you run a better blog? I don't think Quora qualifies as that. I know a few people who are attempting to use the posts feature as a sort of blog, it is not quite the same as an open blog. It is more like a Twitter follow on a access limited account.
As someone loves Quora and is very grateful for it (so far, at least), I can say that they have innovated mostly on the technical front.
Their differentiating factor is actually not technology. It is something that even the best of technology can find hard to solve - curation of content and the community.
One thing I can certainly think of that Quora has done right is to dis-incentivize the A-list. There is no reputation score in Quora, your follow count means nothing in your ability to participate anywhere. You contribute most often because you genuinely want to.
To conclude, I like Robert for his sincerity and passion, but his take on most technology and products are pretty poor.
Stack Overflow is all about getting great answers to questions. Everything, from the reputation system, answer sorting, moderation, etc is designed so that the questions that are asked are on topic and objective, and that the best answers are situated right underneath. Not surprisingly, this focus was borne out of frustration with Experts Exchange playing tricks and hiding the answer to the question on the bottom of the page.
Quora, on the other hand, is all about social connection and discussion. It does have a ranking system, but kinds of questions and answers that are typically found on the site are much more subjective and are designed to encourage many people to weigh in and provide different points of view. Quora also places higher importance on the person's real name and employer than a Stack Overflow-like score for on-site contributions.
Overall, I think the title of Scoble's post ("Is Quora the biggest blogging innovation in 10 years?") sums up the difference quite clearly - Quora clearly has more in common with blogging than it does with straight-up Q&A like Stack Overflow.