Quora – The new social phenomenon for 1Q 2011!

Quora – Useful Questions & Answers

While it may not be the newest kid on the block, Quora is definitely “on fire.” Founded by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever in June 2009, Quora was first launched in private beta in January 2010. I signed up only recently, but judging by the numbers of people connecting with me (4-5 per day), there is evidently a virtual tsunami taking place.

What is Quora? It is “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.” Among the thousands of questions now populating Quora, is ‘how many people use Quora?’ and the answer mid December 2010 was 378,639. The buzz is on and I would believe that that number could well have doubled in the space of the last 30 days! What is interesting about Quora is that it helps organize the questions at the same time providing a stream of unsuspecting questions which you can surf at will.

If you have not tried it yet, please do so. [You need an invite to join — send me an email {minter@thewww.minterdial.com} and I can help you out!] It could be a wonderful complement to sites such as eHow, Ask (formerly AskJeeves) and, even, Wikipedia. Moreover, participation in the Quora forums is Google friendly… (and presumably shows up well in all search engines, too). As with all these types of social tools, though, what you put in is what you [should] get out, and “putting in” means participating and contributing. Don’t be surprised as there are obviously many unanswered questions too… part of the teething pains I am sure.