The past five years has seen many a brainchild take form, institute and compete with large well-established companies. The charm of the web gives more life to those inspirations year by year. Deciphering what people want and giving them what they asked for and more makes such a start-up all the more valuable. One such truly mesmerizing startup that has caught attention of netizens ever since it was first launched is Quora.

Quora, formerly called as Alma Networks, was a thought well nurtured by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever. Founded in June of ’09, the private beta was released in Jan ’10. It was open to the public from 21^st June, 2012. The co-founders history is worth mentioning. Adam served as the CTO and vice president of engineering of Facebook and Charlie supervised the Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform. Quitting such high profile jobs and choosing to be an entrepreneur did raise a few questions then, but getting an overall alexa rank of 810 within a matter of two years is no easy feat.

Quora is a Q&A site, a fast-growing, popular online knowledge market, where you can expect genuine answers from the top notch people in that respective field, setting it apart from its main competitors Yahoo! Answers, reddit, Mahalo Answers, Aardvark, social networking and such. So don’t be surprised if a CEO you admire answers your question.

Sign up is free and you can login to Quora using either your Facebook or your Twitter accounts. Another important thing that you first notice is that you can’t use an alias for your name. So, this, sort of sets the bases for “no nonsense” business, a fact I admire the most, for asking a question and getting a comical answer isn’t really that funny. The questions are divided into topics and you either pose a question or check the answers to the questions already asked. The answers to those questions make a wiki of their own, and better – they can be opinionated, which provides a true insight to that particular situation.

To make it more fun, Quora came up with ‘paying up’ for showing a question to everyone following that topic. Relax; you just have to pay 50 bucks from your imaginary pocket to show your question on all the feeds of people who follow that topic. You start off with 500 credits and you get 20 for answering some question and 10 if someone upvotes your answer. Quora constantly refreshes you credit budget so that you don’t run out of it.

Even before its debut, Quora was praised and endorsed by many. Allen &Co. and Goldman Sachs declared Quora to have a promising future. Its Integration with Facebook Timeline last month, brought a positive response from the users. CrunchBase states that “… eventually when you see a link to a question page on Quora, your feeling should be: ‘Oh, great! That’s going to have all the information I want about that’…”  After reading all this, if you are not an active member of the Quora community… well, wouldn’t that be something new??

Nikitha

Nikitha já escreveu 19 posts.