Fountain aims to turn the answers game into a Siri-like smartphone experience

(I used to work at Quora, my opinions your own)

It's a bit early to say, but I don't think this directly competes with Quora. There have already been many peer-to-peer connecting Q&A services like Aardvark and expert networks like Pearl, as well as lighter social friend/friend of friend Q&A like Jelly.

What Quora purports to provide that these don't is a (mostly) permanent corpus of knowledge that is available later. One to one Q&A is definitely great for getting you an answer to a specific question now, but it doesn't give you a broad picture for things that aren't as laser focused.

A lot of the "personal experience" content on Quora is pretty good, like what it was like to be in the WTC when 9/11 happened. This is of course not the kind of thing an individual needs to connect to another individual to find out (though it's still interesting), so I think that Fountain (the app referred to in the article) will have its own niche that is very distinct from Quora's.

Things like Fountain and Pearl are useful for individual experiences, and experts will make decent money if the platforms are successful, but what you end up with is the monetization of repetitive questions, rather than a resource where you can access a variety of answers for questions. They tend to be a place people go to ask specific legal and medical questions, as well as things like home care/maintenance, but outside those fields they can be a lot less useful.

This article is PR at its most effective. An established founder snaps up a fancy domain name and his PR team convinces a reporter that Quora has somehow failed. I've found no such consensus of Quora having failed as a business (http://www.quora.com/Has-Quora-as-a-business-failed), nor as an expert question and answer site.

Anyway, the problem with Fountain is you still have to ask a question. And if you can formulate a good question to begin with, Google (which is fast and free) might very well provide a better answer than some random domain expert willing to answer random questions for small amounts of money.

I don't think it's fair to say Quora has failed. This sounds like something different. Whether or not it will work remains TBD.

I do recall having an eerily similar idea for a mobile-based Q&A system at least 6 years ago though, and decided not to try building it at the time, as I just didn't think it would catch on. Things have changed a bit now - there are more smartphones, more 4G and wifi, and people have grown accustomed to Siri and Google whatever, so this might be more palatable now than it was then. But I have to admit, even being someone who's really interested in this kind of app, I am a bit skeptical.

Still, this conversation has rekindled my interest in this area, and I now find myself considering starting on an open-source version of something like this, if there isn't one out there yet.

Any new entrant into this field is going to have to immediately convince me it's better-designed than StackExchange.

NLP on verbal requests (isn't this already baked into Android and ios?), video responses seem like decorative sugar to me.

Quora has loads of great content, but is still failing for me because it's constantly nagging for me to login. Annoying people to death and hiding anything of value is not the way to entice people to come back again and again.

It is odd (or maybe just linkbaity) for Wired to bill this as a replacement for to "succeed where Quora failed".

Especially in light of the fact that Quora focuses on a much wider base of users and topic areas, layered with interesting experiments like having notable personalities (across different fields) answer questions and having users' answers re-published elsewhere.

This idea is not new. There have been plenty of QA sites that implement NLP, or have a series of pre-screened "Experts" who claim to answer all your question.

Problem is, it will be difficult to get a user to pay for something when the majority of internet users believe (rightly or not)that there are 1000s of Q&A sites like Quora, StackExchange's family of site covering everything from coding to cooking to physics and science, that are FREE and that do have Quality answers in many instances that are also community curated and rated.

So why would any user pay?

I don't blame Quora (or Fountain) for trying to profit from being a centralized Q&A site. But when I'm Googling for an answer to my technical problem, I'll go to a Stack Exchange site first. As an end-user, I see Quora as little more than a newer version of Experts-Exchange: there may be useful information lurking behind the pop-up dialogs and intentional obfuscation, but it's a pain in the ass.

The internet is already completely and absolutely filled with places for people to go and ask the same ol' FAQs over and over and over and over again.

Reddit and Quora are both completely intolerable to me because of the constant, micro-scopic topical navel gazing.

If Fountain doesn't address this first and foremost in their technical plan, there's no hope for the product.

There is money to be made in premium concierge services that actually get the job done. Such services have so far relied (and will continue to rely) on humans, but smart technology may be able to automate the service seamlessly 80% of the time and thereby lower costs.

In theory like all of its predecessors such as Yahoo Answers and indirect competitors like Quora, Fountain is a great idea, in theory, but in practice we all know that it will not go very far. And that is not a reflection of Aaron Patzer's inability to act upon an idea, Mint.com obviously was a big success, however, to me at least, Fountain will fail for one reason and one reason only: people do not like to pay for things on the Internet like this.

It is a sad reality that the only thing that really makes money on the internet is e-commerce (online stores), popular subscription based services/games and advertisements. People have built up this image of the Internet being for finding answers to your questions for free. I could be wrong and who am I to say that Aaron can not make this succeed? He obviously has a lot more experience, capital and connections to try and pull something like this off.

Adding in the ability to have a chat with someone in many different ways is quite cool, but I would not go as far as calling it groundbreaking or new. The whole premise of a proper Q&A platform and accompanying application is something that this article acknowledges has been done many times before.

I think it is a bit sensationalist to say that Quora failed, in my opinion it is thriving. As a regular Quora user I can attest that it is not a Q&A website in the sense of the terms we have come to know. When my dishwasher stops working, I do not ask people on Quora nor do I seek out existing answers on how to fix it. Quora in my opinion is for sharing interesting stories about experiences. Most of my uses are reading interesting questions with interesting answers ranging from drug dealer experiences to physics and more.

Some of my favourite Quora questions/answers include:

What does it feel like to shoot someone in the line of duty? http://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-shoot-someone...

If the world were a cube, how would gravity be different? http://www.quora.com/If-the-world-were-a-cube-how-would-grav...

What is it like to be a drug dealer? http://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-drug-dealer

I wish Aaron the best of luck with this idea and if it succeeds, I will be the first person here to admit that I was wrong about someone being able to finally crack the big problem of a decent Q&A platform where answers are credible and the consistency and quality of the platform can be maintained as it grows in size.

We changed the title to a more accurate and neutral sentence from the article (adjusted to fit the 80-char limit).

Normally we'd be inclined to leave such a title intact, but this one is particularly misleading. The article doesn't even mention Quora outside of one perfunctory list of Q&A products.