Wisdio, a social QA site like Quora, has decided to up the social QA ante by adding something they’re calling WAR – Wisdio Authority Ratings. These ratings allow folks to recieve answers from authorities on their subject of choice, thereby reducing the number of incorrect answers and, one would hope, increasing the utility of the site.
Founded by Sebastian Zontek, Wisdio aims to help “find the right people to answer questions quickly and reliably,” not unlike many of its competitors. However, the WAR score offers a one-stop shop for folks trying to figure out who to trust and, one would assume, listen to. For example, I can say I’m an expert in Social Media (which I am. I have LOTS of followers on Orkut) but in order to increase my score I need to answer questions about social media. This prevents gadflies from answering questions willy nilly and reduces useless responses. → Read More
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 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.”
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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
Quora is taking a step beyond Q&A this morning with its latest product launch, boards. Users can now set up their own personal-themed bookmarking boards, sort of like a Pinterest for text-based information.
Writes Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo in a blog post, “As Quora has grown, we’ve learned that people want to read the most interesting content regardless of whether it happens to be in question and answer format or not.” D’Angelo tells me that this shift fits in better with Quora’s new goal, “to connect you with everything you want to know about.” Its old goal was described as “a continuously improving collection of questions and answers.”
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It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
You know what I’m into? Quora‘s efforts at gamification. Because listen, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever could have chosen to devote their youth to anything on earth and they have chosen to build a database of all content that people want to know. Valid.
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Very very quietly (there is almost no Google footprint), investment bank and securities firm Goldman Sachs held its “Private Internet Company Conference” this week in Las Vegas. During the two-day conference, which lasted from November 29-30th, a gaggle of companies presented their business models to an elite audience composed of bankers, investors and peers. → Read More
Good news people who are really curious about Quora growth! You might one day be reading an article like this about Quora …
Because Quora has hired a former Twitter and Facebook guy, Andy Johns, to focus on user growth and engagement. Johns, who tweets under the apropos username @ibringtraffic, spent a year and four months at Twitter, two years at Facebook and is now taking his speciality to the fancy Q&A startup.
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After five months of beta testing, Quora has made its Quora Credits and “Ask to Answer” User Suggestions live for everyone today.
All users can now earn credits for a variety of positive and user engagement-magnifying Quora behaviors like answering questions they’ve been asked to answer, getting votes on answers to questions they’ve solicited through “Ask to Answer” and getting votes on their answers to other questions. Users can also give each other credits, which is awesome and can be managed through the Credit interface here. → Read More
It’s hard when you’re new to a city and have no friends. When I visit a new city I tend to hide in trees and behind garbage bins and watch people from afar, seeing where they go to eat and socialize. Then I go to those places at night, when they’re closed, and sniff the air for their scent. However, Drumo offers an improved method for finding out specific things about a city using Quora-style discussion connected to geodata of major metropolitan areas. → Read More
Quora can be an addiction. You visit the site just to see what’s going on, 30 minutes later you’re still there. Today, the addiction goes mobile. Finally.
The service has just released their first iOS native app. Tailored for the iPhone and iPod touch, I can safely say that it’s awesome. I’ve been testing it out for the past few days, and my own personal usage of the service has already skyrocketed. Why? A few reasons. → Read More
Q&A site Quora has just unveiled a revamp of its commenting system, the most notable change being the implementation of a threaded commenting feature for the discussions under a question and its subsequent answers. The new threaded comments allow users to reply to specific comments in an answer thread, intuitively by entering text into the Reply box under each comment. → Read More
Earlier today, I was checking out some new questions in the TechCrunch topic area on Quora. One in particular caught my eye: How was TechCrunch traffic affected by their major redesign in July 2011?
This has been something I’ve seen asked here and there given the radical changes we implemented — and, I assume, given the audience issues Gawker faced after their recent redesign. Mostly, people seem to want to know: is TechCrunch tanking?
I was set to weigh in, when I noticed that someone else already had. This person (not affiliated with TechCrunch) painted a picture in which our site was essentially crashing and burning since the redesign (the answer has since been removed by Quora, presumably due to down-voting). Their source? Compete. → Read More
Some of the most interesting and relevant content on Quora are related to places. But up until now, Quora hasn’t done much to focus that data using location. Today, they’re starting to.
A new feature going live shortly will allow users to set location information for topics. For example, if there’s a topic about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, you can now drop a pin to indicate where that is on a map. This location will then show up to everyone browsing that topic. And the map can be set to show the satellite or terrain view as well (they’re using Google Maps). Specific addresses can also be entered.
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Yes yes I know Facebook Questions pivoted into some kind of “poll your friends” thing back in March but still this is sort of funny, simply because it’s the most symbolic concession of the Q&A space I’ve seen from Facebook yet. Hey, people interested in interning at Facebook, ask a question about it, ON QUORA.
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If you’re going to go through all the trouble of streamlining your Topic pages and creating Topic Groups, you might as well develop an over-arching way to get your users psyched about Topics. Quora Browse, a beautifully redesigned Browse page that is once again an effort to prevent this type of user confusion surrounding ways to get to the content they care about. → Read More
Quora has just launched a bundle of interesting initiatives over the past day or so, all signs that the Q&A site is trying to figure itself out.
First of all, the company has begun testing something called “Ask to Answer Suggestions” where users start out with a budget of 500 Quora credits (Quoins?) and can offer to pay other users in credits to answer questions. The price for questions will eventually increase or decrease based on answerer’s zeal for answering questions and level of topic expertise. → Read More
Quora, which is fresh of being one of the three chosen startups at Allen & Co conference, is adding the option to embed YouTube video in its answer pages, posts and question details this morning.
The Q & A site recently redesigned in order to offer users a better way to search for content and this latest step is yet another in its effort to provide a better user experience. “It’s going to make answers on the site great — It opens the door to the kind of answers you can provide,” says Quora’s Mark Bodnick. As an example he brings up the “Which are the best storytelling songs?” page, which now has around 60 videos. If anything, it’s a good bet video will increase user time on site. → Read More
The Allen and Co. conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho is a peculiar beast. Press aren’t allowed to attend or cover any of the panels and aren’t allowed in the storied Duchin bar.
In addition, attendees are not allowed to talk to the press about the content of any of the meetings which makes for some interesting adventures in reporting.
Still, despite restrictions, attendance is totally worthwhile; After all it’s the place where mythical investor Warren Buffett rubs elbows with Zynga founder Mark Pincus rubs elbows with actress Salma Hayek rubs elbows with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason rubs elbows with fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg rubs elbows with Facebook investor Peter Thiel and so forth. → Read More
Earlier this week Turntable.fm crossed a milestone. No, it wasn’t hitting a reported 140K users one month after launching, nor was it being added to the list of portfolio companies for First Round Capital (granted it was just a logo refresh from the company’s previous product incarnation, StickyBits).
In fact, the ultimate sign that the crowdsourced music service had arrived was more subtle than a milestone metric and ran under the radar for anyone who isn’t finely attuned to these things; on Tuesday the artist Sir Mix A Lot (of “Baby’s Got Back” fame) DJ’d a set on Turntable.fm replete with a custom hacked avatar that differentiated him from the available cookie cutter options. → Read More
