Ever wondered what would happen if Twitter, Facebook and Google Wave were combined?! Well, we’re sorry to tell you, CTO Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever beat you to it in June 2009, when they founded Quora. It was launched in private beta in December 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010.
So what is Quora?
To quote their own words: “Quora connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you. “
Robert Scoble, seems skeptic about the website though ; “Quora succeeded in combining attributes of various websites that employ a system of users voting content up however it is a horrid service for blogging, and while it was a decent question and answer website, it was not substantially better than competing sites.”
In other words:
-50 credits if the upvote is from the person who asked the question.
-10 credits if the upvote is from anyone else.
-500 credits once you start off using Quora.
-20 credits when people follow questions you ask.
-10 credits when people upvote your contributions.
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Quora added two substantial feature to their website; the first one is the elimination of the original “Pay to show to Topics” feature of Credits, where users would have to pay credits to have their questions show up to people following specific topics. Instead, users will have to pay 50 credits to ask a question, any question and all topic additions are “free.”
Users can earn credits by having their questions and answers upvoted, answering ” Ask to Answer” questions or having users gift them credits.
The second added feature is the “Promote” ; yet another way to use credits to give desired content more visibility throughout Quora.
With Quora Promote, a user pays one credit for every two people he or she would like to have the chosen content promoted to (i.e. 100 credits for 200 people). The people who are being promoted here are exactly the same ones who would have seen it anyways, a.k.a. followers of the topic and/or of the person who posted it. Hence, our thoughts that this “Promote” is a little nonsensical, however D’Angelo seems to think otherwise.
If you are already an avid Quora user, you probably have the Iphone app that alerts you right away when someone votes up one of your answers or replies to one of your comments. You can simulate that on your computer; install Charm of Quora if you are using Chrome, Firefox or Safari. It shows recommended content and boards. You can post, search, view notifications directly from the extension.
As Sandra Liu Huang, Quora product manager, answered a question on Quora stating that the android app must be available this April for a limited beta testing.
From what’s being said around, the startup wants to raise between $30 to $50 million in its Series B, at a $400 million valuation – while potential investors are most certainly interested , co founder D’Angelo will be contributing from his own money ; adding up to $20 million according to one source.
Whether it is just another Silicon Valley popular start-up, or actually a valid asset to our daily life, it sure is worth looking into.
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