My Initial Take On Quora

Quora is a Q&A social network that has gained quite a lot of attention on Twitter and the rest of the online media lately. Well, it is only normal when your user base explodes in the last month of the year 2010, and some say even doubled in the first days of 2011. There is a reason for this surge in new users to be happening. As opposed to Yahoo Answers, Quora managed to offer a social graph transfer from your Twitter and Facebook account. Once you sign up, you automatically start following everyone in your following and friends list on Quora. (Now, why Yahoo didn’t think of that?)

Quora is a great tool for those that love sharing information and getting such. It is genuinely a platform where people get to ask questions, post answers and browse/follow topics. It is all user-generated and very straightforward. No noise, seriously! The design is minimalistic, and you can’t really get lost.

It will not replace Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn Answers, for that matter. But it does a good job when you are focused on a topical conversation. On top of that, it gives you the option to create blog posts from questions and answers posted on Quora. This can only bey did for Tumblr and WordPress back-ends, but I guess there is more to come. It is also integrated with your Twitter and Facebook account, and your activity on Quora can be shown in your Twitter stream or Facebook wall.

A couple of things on the user experience side of Quora:

Be prepared for email notification inundation! If you don’t tweak the settings, you are in for tons of emails (especially if you have a big social graph).
The first option displayed when you want to invite friends is only “Find Contacts from your Address Book”. And when you click on Skip, it shows you “Invite people by Email”. Now I don’t know whose brilliant idea is that but how about have them both on the same page and not asking me to do extra clicks?
Having to get an invite is a bore. Especially when you just want to try it out. I guess this selling proposition has pros and cons. But it took me more than 24 hours to find a person that can send me an invite.

By the way, if you need an invitation, just drop me a line with your email address, and I’ll make sure to send you one!

Special thanks to Sara Bobkoff at www.nativecontent.eu who provided me with an invite.

You can follow me on Quora right here!

I would love to read opinions on Quora. Don’t hesitate to post them in the comment section.

Image source: Quora