Video Post: Quora's Success is a Question that Remains to be Answered

In today's Daily Axioms video post, Steve discusses how the Q&A site Quora overhauled itself in 2011 by borrowing elements from other social networks:

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.

Who Stands to Lose the Most from Quora's Explosive Growth? Quora

I've been using the Q & A site Quora for a few months now, and had even mentioned the site on Daily Axioms back in early December.

But over the past few weeks, numerous mentions in big name social media news sites have pushed Quora into the spotlight. This newfound fame has led to everything from a huge spike in new users to sites parodying its shortcomings. But either way, many pundits are wondering if Quora might be the "next big thing" in the social media universe.

And as a active user, I offer my own view on that very question: I sure hope not.

There are three main reasons why Quora shouldn't be happy about its explosive growth.

1. Logistics: Quora simply doesn't have the infrastructure to support the amount of new users they are getting, which has led to several crashes and spam attempts already. Obviously, those are all fixable problems, but Quora needs to patch things up quickly.
2. Steep learning curve: Many of the answers found on the site are a lot longer than 140 characters, and I even remember spending about 15 minutes working on an answer once. The problem is that the average user doesn't realize how active you have to be to get any use out of the site and quickly abandons it.
3. Alienating existing users: This is the biggest problem Quora will face in the coming weeks. Much of the site's charm revolved around the thought-out posts and internal code of conduct that the users shared. The flood of new users have troubled many of the existing users, creating a bit of an internal backlash. However, Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever wrote a post expressing his commitment to maintaining quality. Whether or not it will be effective has yet to be seen, but it is definitely a necessary step.

The bottom line is that I don't believe Quora is made for a Facebook or Twitter-like user base. It's not made to be the "next big thing" and I for one am just fine with that.

The 140-Character Future of RSS Feeds

I admit it. I was a bit late to the Twitter party, just getting into the tweeting game a few months ago. And although I've fully embraced it now, it took me a month or so to figure out how to get the most out of it.

Starting out, I (like many others) used Twitter as a sort of RSS feed for news or sports. Apparently, the discussion forum Quora has latched on to the idea as well. Since it's early days, Quora has allowed users to follow topics on the site to view new or edited questions relevant to them as they appear.

But now, Quora has created Twitter accounts for nearly all of their topics. There are accounts for very broad topics like "social media" (@q_socialmedia) or "science" (@q_science) and brand specific accounts like "Nikon" (@q_nikon). If you already have a Quora account, the accounts for the topics you follow show up here.

Now it's not exactly a true Twitter account, because the @QuoraQuestions account tweets out any questions and, if the question is about the topic you subscribe to, retweets it to the topic-specific feed.

It may be a modified Twitter account or it may be a new form of RSS feed, but either way it's still an intriguing method of sending out data and good for Quora users who spend way more time on Twitter than in their email inboxes.

Questionable Moves by Google Worth a Second Look

Usually when I talk about recent developments from Google, it's in reference to some big announcement or new feature and why it is/isn't a good idea. But today, I'd like to switch things up a bit and talk about a couple non-product issues that have come up over the past 24 hours that I found interesting.

The first was a story from TechCrunch about MySpace getting ripped on the discussion forum Quora when a user asked whether or not MySpace will be able to recover. Not so bad, right? But what was surprising was that one of the answers came from Google's VP of Corporate Development, who responded with a very sarcastic "Is this a real question?"

The reason this caught my attention is that Google is a major advertising partner with MySpace, so I'm surprised that Google would publicly criticize them. But is this a sign of an upcoming split, or Google simply being realistic?

The second move by Google yesterday was the announcement that new Flickr users will now be able to use their Google account to sign in, rather than using/creating a Yahoo account. My main criticism of this move is the fact that existing Flickr users still have to use their Yahoo account (which I only use to get into Flickr, usually after 3 or 4 failed attempts because I can never remember my Yahoo login info!)

My personal criticisms aside, there is one other huge reason people are questioning this move; Google owns Picasa, a direct competitor with Flickr. At first I agreed with these critics, but let's face it: Flickr is the gold standard of photo-sharing and Picasa is a distant second. So in many ways this a win-win, because Google will keep people from creating new Yahoo accounts to use Flickr while Yahoo will get more people to use Flickr instead of Picasa.

Both of these moves by Google show that even the little moves a company makes can have a major ripple effect.