Friday, October 7, 2011

Will Quora Hit Another Growth Spurt?

It's been quite a while since the Q&A site Quora was making headlines. After becoming a media darling in late 2010, the site saw a massive spike in new users.

But then things got quiet for Quora.

In a classic "middle child" scenario, Quora struggled to steal attention away from the successful older brother (Facebook) and the new baby sister (Google Plus). The latter two continued to horde the social media spotlight in 2011, with launches and updates throughout the spring and summer.

Quora's look-at-me moment came last week with the release of an official iOS app. The app itself has been received quite well actually, taking full advantage of a new "shuffle" feature that pulls up random questions from the site.

It's a great StumbleUpon-like time waster, and should lead to a lot more time spent on the site...if users can find it.

Not only was the feature itself not heavily promoted on Quora's end, but they buried it far down on the bottom of both their app and their website. Hopefully they can remedy this soon to avoid losing momentum.

Regardless, its good to see the site making strides and trying to stand out in the ever-growing social media family.