I’ve seen Quora as a platform where people talk about serious stuff in greater length and depth. The discussions there are usually carried out more critically and formally than in other major social platforms. Many of the questions asked involve consulting, advising, debating, and general answering for nontrivial questions. Today Quora launched the blogging feature which provides a new way of information publishing and sharing for its users (http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/23/quora-launches-blogging-platform-with-mobile-text-editor-to-give-every-author-a-built-in-audience/). Many have expected this as lots of existing answers are already as lengthy and individual blog post. So what does it mean?
It’s not hard to see that a lot questions on Quora are related to making personal decisions or seeking suggestions among high stake choices. Fortunately , there are an enormous amount of great responders who use their own stories to illustrate, contribute, and help other people on the platform. I believe the personal experiences and stories are the best contents shared on Quora and also generate the most value for the community.
A blog ecosystem is a great way to aggregate the knowledge and stories in the way that in addition to the existing question/answer form of information sharing, the user can also look for and follow someone’s blog of specialized domain knowledge in order to learn from the blog authors’ personal insights and stories. Such kind of learning from other people’s experience and what they learned is a great way to help someone with her own decisions and questions. Blogging is also more efficient for the responders to share information on certain topics broadly and is also a more attractive way to build readership/leadership.
I’d imagine (and predict) that the main difference between a regular blog and a Quora blog is that Quora blog will include much more useful information and stories regarding career consulting and personal development dedicated to helping people who need to make the tough decisions that the authors have made before. In essence, the blog feature established a platform to crowd source the decision making process with real persons and real stories. I believe there is a growing fundamental need of people trying to figure out what to do in their lives, how some careers looks like, and what to choose from a variety of opportunities Quora is just another company that started tapping the potential of such need.
To extend this thought, i think right now we can see a increasingly clearer devision of the entertaining social networks and the career development/knowledge exchange networks, and there are dozens of networks working on particular focus of interests in each category. However, people’s attention is a limited resource and would only be able to use a few of the networks to manage their life. It is not easy to see if many networks are able to co-exist in the next few years.
For people who love math – it might just be a simple math question to answer : given 1 billion online users, each of whom use 4 social networks. If each network contains half a million to 50 million users, what’s the upper bound and lower bound of the number of networks to exist?
Entangled String 