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
Quora has just announced a redesign of its Topic Pages and the introduction of Topic Groups, aiming to make information discovery and navigation on the site a little bit easier. The motivation behind these changes is a thrust towards ease of search and content relevancy on Quora, as there is currently a ton of content on the site that people need to figure out how to navigate.
Now instead of a chronological stream on Topics Pages (which you can get to via the tags in questions), users will see Best Questions, Open Questions as well as Featured Questions and Frequently Asked Questions depending on the topic. → Read More
Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever not only doesn’t want to sell his hot start-up but – as he told me backstage earlier this week at Disrupt – he even has an explicit non-goal of not selling the company.
Non-goals or not, Cheever has a lot to smile about. Traffic is up to record levels at Quora and the site continues to be a paragon of innovation in the social space. In this interview he explains the difference between Quora and Wikipedia, and we get into many other orthogonal discussions as well. But I wonder if Cheever is tempting fate by having such an explicit non-goal. After all, he’ll look ‘a right Charlie’ if Quora gets snapped up in the frenzy of acquisitions that will probably mark the post LinkedIn-IPO social marketplace. → Read More
At Disrupt NYC, we’re all about startups. We’ve culled two dozen of the hottest startups from over 500 applicants to launch at the event (which starts May 23, get tickets here). We are also bringing startups well on their way to disrupting existing markets onstage to share their experiences.
Two sessions I am particularly excited about will bring the founders of Airbnb, Uber, and Quora to Disrupt NYC. Quora founder Charlie Cheever will be interviewed by Hunch founder Chris Dixon in a live session of his TCTV show Founder Stories. Quora, which was founded by Facebook expats Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, takes a unique social approach to Q&A and general knowledge discovery. Cheever will talk about their approach to designing their product, fostering a community that can provide the best answers on the Web, and how Quora plans to expand to new areas of knowledge and expertise. → Read More
Google Realtime Search is nothing new. For months it has existed as its own area within the search engine’s navigation to search for things happening in realtime. But up until now, that has meant mainly Twitter (thanks to Google’s data deal with that company). But earlier today, it appears Google flipped the switch to make Realtime Search a lot more useful. Namely, they’ve added results from services like Quora, Buzz, Gowalla, and yes, even Facebook.
As pointed out in this Quora thread, it looks like Google flipped the switch to include the data from the services listed above (as well as others) this afternoon. The fact that Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo and CFO Marc Bodnick voted up this Quora posting suggests this did in fact just happen today. → Read More
It’s been a big month in the Marino-Choy household. No sooner did Lisa Marino get promoted to CEO of the would-be comeback-kid RockYou, than did her husband Ro Choy get named COO of the surging Q&A site Formspring. → Read More
Quora is hiring! How do we know? Well Facebook Tech Recruiter and Team Lead Andy Barton just tweeted that today is his first day at the Q&A service. Leaving Facebook along with Barton is Facebook product manager Sandra Liu Huang.
After spending 4 years at Facebook, Andy Barton possibly has the most stacked Rolodex of any person in his field especially with regards to tech talent waiting for vestment and/or IPO. Quora currently has $11 million in funding and 21 employees but something tells me they’ll be expanding on both numbers sometime soon. → Read More
As regular readers of this site will be aware, we love Quora. We love it because of the wealth of knowledge that has poured out of seemingly all corners of the tech sphere and into the service. But the service itself has much broader goals than that. They want to be the organized brain-dump for all human knowledge. That obviously means a lot of verticals beyond technology. And a new feature today should help them march towards that goal in two very important verticals: medicine and law.
Quora now offers legal and medical disclaimers that any doctor or lawyer can easily place at the bottom of their posts. The service has written these disclaimers in a language for each profession that they believe will protect these individuals; while at the same time making it much more clear to other users that the answers are not a substitution for advice/care from your actual doctor or lawyer. And the key part is that these disclaimers are entirely customizable by each doctor/lawyer to suit their needs. → Read More
What’s the Next Big Thing after social networking?
This has been a favorite topic of much speculation among tech enthusiasts for many years. I think we are already witnessing a paradigm shift – a move away from simple social sharing towards personalized, relevant content.
The key element of the next big thing is the increasing significance of the Interest Graph to complement the Social Graph. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google are already working on delivering relevant content, a slew of startups are focusing exclusively on it. → Read More
I was in the air an average of 30 hours a month for the last two years, so I watched a lot of movies — typically semi-delirious on Ambien– that I wouldn’t ordinarily. One of those was the star-studded rom-com “He’s Just Not That Into You.” Note: You won’t see this movie at the Oscars tonight, or any night, and that’s not because it was cruelly overlooked. But as a plane movie, it sufficed.
I’m assuming most TechCrunch readers are far to Y-chromosomey to have seen it or even admit they’ve seen it, so I’ll fill you in on the thrust of the film. Like most things in life, the simplest explanation is usually the right one: If a guy doesn’t call, he didn’t lose your number, he isn’t away on business in Yemin, he wasn’t kidnapped and held at gunpoint– he just didn’t want to call you. All these fairy-tale stories that lonely girls thrive on about how the jerky guy one day woke up and realized how great you are may have happened to somebody, sometime, but that person was the exception, not the rule.
The somewhat cold message of the film is that you shouldn’t live your life assuming you are the exception. (Of course as rom-coms go, the main character does end up being the exception, undercutting the wisdom of the point. But for the purposes of real life, let’s pretend she didn’t and moved on to someone else.)
Believe it or not, this movie came up in conversation at a dinner party in Silicon Valley the other night. → Read More
If Chrome’s best feature is its speed, it’s second best feature has to be the Omnibox. I’m still not sure why every browser doesn’t simply offer one box for both searching and typing in URLs. But the Omnibox is about to get even more powerful, as developers have started fleshing out extensions to take advantage of it.
Google first talked about the Omnibox API back in August of last year, but at that time, it was experimental. But today they’ve done a new post on the Chromium Blog to highlight the option. And developers are wasting little time getting extensions working for it. → Read More
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