Let me see if I have this right: Quora is, in a nutshell, a VC-backed version of Yahoo Answers (without the bigots and jerks answering questions) with the ability to share your answers to user-submitted softball questions with your friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter.
Sound about right?
There’s been a full-court press of Quora love in the first four days of 2011 from some fairly influential social media thought leaders. This of course has led to a gold rush of narcissistic tweets of answers to questions published all up and down my Twitter feed.
I’m not making this up – I even saw a declaration from someone earlier today that “in 2011, we won’t Google things, we’ll Quora them!”
I’m gonna go out of my way to bust that myth straight-on and raise a few questions along the way.
First, Quora is a bit of a boutique site that, until mid-2010, was virtually unknown. In 2011, Quora picked up the secret council of social media experts™ endorsement, helping traffic explode and user-generated content exponentially grow.
I think there are two questions facing Quora right now that could pose as roadblocks to real success: 1) can you convince baby boomers and millenials – the real wild cards – to change their established information hunter-gatherer methodologies? and 2) can you sustain the level of quality content while catering to everyone’s desire to be a subject matter expert?
As of 2011 – and hell, 2012 – I say no. Not when Quora threads like this are heavily voted and promoted by the dreaded early adopters who are hell-bent on proving that, while they missed out on the early days of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, they won’t miss out on being an “expert” on “the next big thing!”
Here is a snippet of the heavily promoted Quora thread I referenced above:
Take 30 minutes and figure out what the ecosystem here is like. Don’t just assume that you’ll figure it out as you go along. This isn’t a free-for-all where you try to prove how smart and informed you are! It isn’t a social network either, despite the fact that you’ll have part of your social graph here.
How many casual users do you think are going to be scared off by reading something like that? Moreover, who has 30 minutes nowadays to dedicate to learning what an ecosystem is like on a new site? Compare that to say, Reddit – it only takes a few minutes of a user’s time to figure out Reddiqitte.
Second, in the always important SEO/visibility world, how will Quora compete with similar topic-driven, user-generated content sites like Squidoo, Mahalo and Yahoo Answers? Unless Google’s algorithm du jour assigns heavier weight to social media frequency/reach, questions like Who is the best member of the Wu-Tang Clan?* won’t crack page 5 or 6: a relative dead zone.
Finally, can we all please stop comparing Quora to Twitter, or calling it the next Twitter? Just because it’s growing fast (on the backs of other social networks & social graphs, natch) doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s some white-hot, bulletproof internet property. It could be, sure, but right now, the hype is deafening for a company that’s only been through one round of VC funding.
* The answer is clearly the RZA.
