Social-networking site Quora has answers to your questions

You seek answers to all sorts of questions on the Internet. But how often are the answers relevant or supplied by someone truly in the know?
There are often smart responses on Quora, a much buzzed about Silicon Valley social start-up that you'll be hearing a lot more about in the weeks ahead. Quora aims to build a constantly evolving collection of questions and answers that are created, edited and organized by the very people who use the free service. In my experience on Quora, I found many of the people answering questions have the intellectual chops or credentials to back up their words.

Curious how much AOL spent distributing all those CDs back in the 1990s? The Quora answer comes from AOL co-founder and former CEO Steve Case: ("A lot! I don't remember the total spending but do recall in the early 1990s our target was to spend 10% of lifetime revenue to get a new subscriber.")

Wonder what Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz thinks of The Social Network (Facebook movie)? Moskovitz weighs in: "It is interesting to see my past rewritten in a way that emphasizes things that didn't matter ... and leaves out things that really did.")


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Quora isn't going to make you ditch Google searches or visits to Wikipedia anytime soon, especially if you want a quick answer. Actually, Quora combines elements from Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, ChaCha.com and the Facebook Questions feature Facebook has opened up to some users.

As on Twitter, you can follow someone on Quora, which means following questions posed or answered by the person. You can also follow a topic area (technology trends, parenting, classical music). Or follow a specific question. It all shows up on your Quora home-page feed.

During setup, you can connect Quora to your Twitter or Facebook accounts, or your blog. You can share questions you post on Twitter or Facebook. You can also invite others to join Quora and suggest topics of interest to them. Pretty much any topic goes. But you're encouraged to word them in a manner likely to generate in-depth responses rather than yes/no answers or responses barely longer than Twitter's 140-character limit.

Examples: How can job seekers in their 40s and 50s improve their marketability in the job market? What are the best tips for potty training a child?

I got three relatively fast responses to my question on whether "augmented reality will garner mainstream interest anytime soon?" My question on if "it is worth gutting your (NBA) team to acquire Carmelo Anthony" received two responses.

Still, it was generally more fun browsing other people's questions and answers than asking my own.

There's no guarantee that answers are accurate or that respondents are who they claim to be. Quora is self-policed by users who vote on whether they like or don't like an answer. A team of Quora reviewers may edit or purge questions with inappropriate content. (Through a filter, you determine whether to allow adult content in your feed.)

Quora co-founder and former Facebook exec Charlie Cheever admitted to me that keeping the quality high "is going to be an incredible challenge" as more of the masses pile onto the service.

There are certain guidelines to posting questions on Quora. For starters, you need to sign up with your real name, and are advised to add a bio that demonstrates your expertise. You can, however, remain anonymous on a per-question basis — which is critical if you're asking or answering a question regarding a sensitive medical condition or potential sexual harassment episode.

Cheever says the goal of any Quora question page is to become the "best source" for folks seeking an answer. Whether that happens remains to be seen. These are early days for Quora. It has 16 employees and opened to the public in mid-2010. It won't say how many users it has.

Quora's interface could be more intuitive. It wasn't immediately evident to me that the box at the top of the page was a search box because of the clickable button next to it labeled "Ask Question." When you do start typing a question, you'll see questions already asked that are similar to yours.

Nor was it obvious that the tiny up-down arrows next to an answer are how you vote yea or nay on an answer. You can add Web links to answers but can't post videos to explain how something works. Quora most likely will be adding video in the future, but didn't share specific timing.

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