A number - and a growing number at that if my following/follower list is anything to go by - have started to explore what is supposed to be one of the fast growing properties of 2011 - Quora. At first sight it doesn't look very impressive, and it takes a while to get into. The idea behind the service is the whole Question and Answer thing. Now, this has of course already been done to death over and over again - Google failed fairly miserably with their Google Answers project while Yahoo has been much more successful with their Yahoo Answers pages. There are a few other services out there as well, which are not quite as well known, but still do a job - AllExperts for example provides answers to over a million questions, ChaCha has built an entire business on asking and answering questions and Ask is also trying to focus on question answering, but since they're rubbish we can ignore them. I've spent a lot of time using a resource called Aardvark, or Vark for short which pops questions up into your Google chat box every now and then on subjects that interest you. Finally, there's always Twitter available if all else fails!
Now, with so many of these resources out there, some of which work and others that have failed, what's the interest in another one, and is it worth spending time using? I think it is, and it's because they have got a good understand of the whole social element. You can follow/be followed and you can also follow subjects that are of interest to you, and individual questions. It's possible to vote up or down answers, and you can quickly see who is expert in particular fields. I've also been impressed by the sheer range of different subject areas that are available. For example, I'm currently following subjects such as Books, Libraries and Librarianship, Netvibes, Slideshare, the US Civil War, and individual questions such as the morality of downloading books v borrowing from a library and which is the best Dr Who. It's a fascinating and glorious mish-mash which I enjoy, although others may find frustrating. You can however of course choose what subjects you want to follow.
The best place to start with Quora is the Question box. This is rather confusing because it's poorly labelled:
It looks as though you have to ask a question. However, once you start typing in a concept a useful little suggestion box pops up:
Clicking on a subject takes you to the page for it, and you can see a list of questions and answers:
Not only is it possible to browse answers and of course ask your own questions, but there are options for creating a FAQ list, create topic aliases, merge topics and so on. This is all rather haphazard at the moment, and it does remind me of the early days of resources such as Wikipedia. I'm sure in due course this will settle down - my own personal bugbear is that there isn't an RSS feed at the moment, so everything comes to me via email, which can be annoying - especially when you get a lot of individual messages telling you that you have a new follower. This can however be fixed in the settings section of your account.
So, that's the basics of how it works. Given all the other resources out there, why should you spend your time on this one? It's a very good question and I'm not keen on the idea of making suggestions that require you to spend even longer on social media sites and less time doing other things. So, first of all, I'd suggest that you take a look at subject areas that interest you. If you can answer any of the questions that have been posed, that's always a nice thing to do - but if you append details of your organisation that will help promote it - or yourself, if you consider yourself to be an expert in a particular field. You might have questions that you want to ask yourself - and I'd suggest giving it a go. If you get a good answer, that may well have saved you some time. If not, you've hardly lost a great deal of time. You can also tweet out your answer to others, so you can blend your social media presence with ease. It's also about Questions and Answers, and isn't that one of the things that we do best?
Another good reason to try it out is because everyone else seems to be doing so at the moment. I'm already seeing 'the usual suspects' poking around and delving into things, and while I admit that 'keeping up with the Joneses' isn't the best reason in the world, if it does turn out that Quora is the next big thing, you'll have got in on the ground floor as it were.
Quora has a way to go yet before its really useful. I'd like to see more resources available, RSS (as mentioned), much more on the social networking front, embedded video and other multimedia, chat options and so on. However, that will all come in time, I'm sure.
So if you have a moment or two - give it a shot.
by invitation only though. How do you get one?
Posted by: petter | January 06, 2011 at 03:19 PM
No, if you go to the home page you can Create an account by signing in with Facebook, or twitter, or sign up with email. :)
Posted by: Phil Bradley | January 06, 2011 at 03:25 PM
Ah, right you are. Thank you!
Posted by: petter | January 07, 2011 at 07:54 AM
How did you find the quality of the answers? I had a look at Quora (written up on the mmitblog blog:http://mmitblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/quora-crowdsourcing-answers/) and wasn't finding the answers were anywhere near the level of usefulness that stackoverflow.com and other StackExchange.com sites offer. I've been looking at Aardvark too and wishing that it was a platform run by librarians as the technology is great, but the content isn't currently matching it.
Posted by: Kate | January 07, 2011 at 11:20 AM
Agree partially on the RSS feed bit. However if you use Rockmelt as a browser it's simple to add the topics you are following to the right-hand column. Just add the URL as a feed and it works. I'm monitoring questions that way quite happily.
Posted by: Arthur Weiss | January 09, 2011 at 11:17 PM