Quora has joined the “Button” wars today with the launch of the Quora “Follow” button, created by Quora engineers Shu-Uesugi and Edmond-Lau. In the same vein as the Twitter “Follow” button, the Quora Follow button can be embedded in any website by cutting and pasting a customized snippet of code from the Quora Resources page. Users can choose between a light button and a dark button to taste.
“The goal is to help people discover great Quora users from the outside of http://www.quora.com,”; says co-founder Charlie Cheever, “Like blogs and personal websites. When someone clicks on your button, he/she will start following you immediately if he/she is logged on to Quora; otherwise he/she will be prompted to log in or sign up.”
In addition to the Quora “Follow” button for users, Quora has launched a “Follow” button for Topics, which works the same way as Follow for people, i.e. insert a Topics link like “http://www.quora.com/Tech-Blogs” in the code generator and add it to your site.
Obviously the other (unspoken) goal of something like a “Follow” button is to bring users back into Quora, which famously doesn’t reveal growth stats. The company recently unveiled Quora boards, a Pinterest-like feature that left some users nostalgic for when Quora was solely a Q&A site.
“We made the embedded follow button because the people who write the most on the site are always happy about ways to get more people to see the awesome writing they’ve put time and passion into,” writes Cheever, “The embedded follow button gives you a way to quickly establish an ongoing relationship with a reader in any context. We think anyone who uses Quora regularly and has a website or blog or other web presence will like it. It’s also part of general theme of being excited about doing a good job integrating with the rest of the open web. You can also now post links onto Quora with boards.”
You guys can follow me on Quora by clicking on the (real, live working) button above.
Quora, founded in June 2009, first launched in private beta in January 2010. Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question. One way you can think of it is as a cache for the research that people do looking things up on the web and asking...
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