Quora. A website that connects you to everything you want to know about. Sounds just like Google, Yahoo, or any other type of search engine, doesn´t it?
Well, not exactly. Quora´s interface is very modern and slick, attracting many users to the site. According to D´Anglelo and Cheever, “we thought that Q & A is one of those areas on the Internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet.” This website was created by two former Facebook employees, Adam D´Angelo and Charlie Cheever and made its debut on Jnauary 4th, 2010. It is a website created, edited, and organized by a community of users. Quora requires users to register with their real names, instead of screen names. Another great feature of Quora is that you can link your account with your Google+, Facebook, and/or Twitter accounts, so you can keep everything connected.
Answers to questions can be upvoted or downvoted, meaning that the more positive votes an answer gets, it is seen higher up on the list. Edits can also be made to exisiting answers posted by users. Each of these characteristics help define the Quora image and set it apart from basic search engines like Google and Yahoo. This site is going to help users filter out questions and answers by signing them up for the topics they’re interested in and getting feedback from top people in the fields they are asking about. The answers to the questions are detailed and useful so users are actually able to get the answers they are looking for.
There have been some privacy concerns pointed out by users to Quora about exposing a user´s activity, including which questions a user has looked at by anyone who uses Quora. By its nature, Quora shows users´ profiles, including their full names to search engines.
I do not use Quora and never heard anything about it until my Journalism 2.0 class last week. After reading several articles published about Quora, I may need to create an account and see what all the fuss is about.
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