Quora: The Next Big Thing?

Why is everyone talking about Quora?  One reason is because a lot of people (even me) are flocking into Quora now, including Ashton Kutcher. (No signs of Justin Bieber yet)!  At the moment, Quora has roughly 200,000 users signed up, however you will need an invitation to join.

What is quora? On quora’s page its “a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it” .In short is a like a Q&A site, similar like yahoo answers and LinkedIn Answers.

For me, Quora is like a cocktail of yahoo answers, LinkedIn Answers and twitter.

Why?

Yahoo Answers – Ask Questions
LinkedIn Answers – Have professional answer questions.
Twitter – You can follow and unfollow people. Like someone answer? FOLLOW them.

Mix them all up and you get Quora. What caught my attention of quora was an article from telegraph.uk mentioning that quora will be bigger than twitter. If you ask me, I don’t see quora becoming as huge as twitter anytime soon. At this point, twitter has roughly 200 million users (some reported they have 220 million). The reason why I say that quora will not be as huge as twitter is because I don’t think people will go into Quora everyday to ask questions or answer questions.

Unless they are dedicated in helping new users or people who ask questions or experts in the field. I do see freelancers like web designers, coders, tech users, or people with the same passion like photography using this daily though. What about teens? Maybe not! However, I will definitely spend some time everyday and follow topics on twitter and social media.

What makes twitter huge is because of its simplicity and the ability to connect with people without boundaries. Having said that, I think what makes Quora special is the relevancy. Quora is more relevant and more targeted compared to twitter. It works very well if you want to ask a question, and you can get them answered.  With twitter if you’re not active or doesn’t spend much time on it, you might not get any replies at all. That was why Shamus wrote a blog post if twitter should do a quora and let you follow topics.

I would say YES. One reason is because twitter wants to add more relevance. Since they want to do this, then this is one way of doing just that.  Twitter could actually have a competitive advantage with doing a Quora with their user base and businesses accounts on twitter. It would also make topics to be followed easily.

My suggestion to twitter? Have two features to add relevancy.

1) Top tweets – Like facebook’s top news, twitter should have the top tweets arranged according to every  10,30 or hourly. Something to help users to know what is HOT as well as get the most recent updates.
2) Quora -Adds more relevant. Twitter users are able to follow topics, hence follow more targeted followers. Businesses are able to see if anyone are talking about their brands and questions people are asking. Brands are able to reply to those questions as well.

Quora’s Future?

Facebook will get worried and start implement facebook Q&A to everyone so that people will use their Q&A instead of quora.  Secondly, Google will want to acquire it. In the future I will explain why Google should buy quora.