The beginning of this year has been all about question and answer site Quora. Having put aside some time this morning to have my first peek I have to admit that it is a fun site. A little like a cross between Yahoo! Answers and Reddit, it enables users to debate a question in an organised fashion, commenting on answers and approving or disapproving them.
Launched last May as a beta, Quora has exploded in the last week or so, but I was nervous to get involved – there is already limited time in the day to interact on the social networks I am involved in. The immediate function that struck me was how easily it integrated into my existing social networks on Facebook and Twitter. It followed all my Twitter friends who are already using it. No need to build a brand new network and already lots of things to look at. (This is a common aspect of most social networks now.)
The problem Quora will have is that it is very time consuming. The benefit of both Facebook and Twitter is that they can run in the background of your life and you can check in as and when. Quora requires indepth reading and so takes up a lot more time – half an hour flew by this morning. This is fine, but it means that many people will fade away as the novelty wears off and other distractions take it’s place.
So yes, it is just another social network. It won’t replace Twitter, since it’s not really a place to have a chat as well as share information. I suspect people will talk about it and how to share links to enhance SEO etc, but there will be limited effectiveness.
For further reading on this I strongly recommend Dave Chaffey’s article on iMedia:
