There sure are a lot of Q&A sites on the Internet, but not all Q&A sites are the same. In the Founder Stories video above, Stack Exchange CEO Joel Spolsky talks about the origins of Q&A sites and his competition. Stack Exchange operates Stack Overflow and other peer-reviewed knowledge sites. Spolsky minces no words in his contempt for the Big Daddy of Q&A sites, Yahoo Answers.

“Yahoo Answers is Teenage chat,” says Spolsky. “Nobody wants to find Yahoo Answers in their search results. It is one-sentence gibberish.” Stack Overflow, in contrast, goes deep. Stack Overflow users gain reputation by giving the best answers, and answers are peer-reviewed. It doesn’t cover every topic under the sun, either, just programming.

Stack Overflow is often compared to Quora, another geeky Q&A site that attracts tons of smart people. With Stack Exchange, Spolsky is broadening to other topics and communities such as cooking and photography, but he will only go where his audience takes him.

Given its roots with programmers, that means that new Stack Exchange verticals may not be as mainstream as those of competing sites, but that’s okay with Spolsky. The Stack Exchange sites are still growing 40 percent to 50 percent per month.

(Watch Part I and Part II of this interview and other episodes of Founder Stories, which is now available on iTunes)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/20/quora-vs-stackexchange/

Quora is a new question-and-answer site on which a few notable members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite have expressed their opinions.  Some of the discussions have been very informative; some, completely misinformed.  Some questions are of general interest, such as: Will there be a tech sector crash in the near future?; some are obscure: Who are the most successful entrepreneurs with Iranian roots?; some are just plain silly: How much does Netflix spend on postage each year? Quora’s membership is growing largely because of the attention that TechCrunch has given it (including the Best Startup award). Over the last month, I have received dozens of messages from TechCrunch readers asking what I think about Quora and why I am not using it.

The answer is simple: I think that Quora will continue to be an excellent resource if the same people who have been hyping it, and who have invested in it, keep posting their thoughtful answers. But I believe that the excess hype is destined to make Quora a victim of its own press.  The quality of answers will decline.  The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora’s #1 respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they get drowned out by the noise from the masses.  They will turn away after having their posts voted down (so that they look less important than their peers) and being personally subjected to the types of mindless, anonymous attacks that you see in the comments section of TechCrunch.

Not to say that there aren’t many other smart people who will post good answers.  But when there are hundreds of answers to a given question, by people you have never heard of (often with fictitious names), how will you separate the wheat from the chaff?  And how will you distinguish fact from fiction?  You certainly can’t trust the rankings of the respondents when these rankings are themselves generated by Quora users.

Quora says it will educate users on its policies, guidelines, and conventions and that it will moderate answers more effectively.  It claims that the site does not allow anonymity.  But you can easily sign up for a Quora account with any of your Twitter accounts (you can create as many of these as you want—with fictitious names).  You can then vote down answers from people you don’t like, edit questions asked by others, and post your own views.  You can talk about your own products and services, and disparage others’; in other words, it is a spammers’ paradise.  How is Quora going to manage hundreds of thousands—or millions—of unruly users, when even the mighty Google seems to be losing the battle for spam?

Right now, Quora is tech focused.  Its fans proudly proclaim that its usage will spread, just as usage of Twitter did; that it will become a platform for everything from product research to customer service to education.  Robert Scoble expects it to create a “great community and way for people to communicate about what’s interesting in their lives in a new way”.

Silicon Valley is again drinking its own Kool-Aid; it is looking at the world through its own prism. This is a common problem here, where we jump from one fad to another; where venture capitalists start investing in similar technologies and drive company valuations through the roof; where TechCrunch hypes the technology du jour and causes entrepreneurs all over the world to drop what they are doing in favor of building copycat technologies.

Quora isn’t going to be a Facebook or a Twitter. It is not likely to even catch up with the current market leaders in the Q&A space—Answers.com and Yahoo! Answers (which both get more than 40 million unique visitors a month, compared with Quora’s meager 150,000). Unlike Facebook, where everyone socializes, and Twitter, where ordinary people tell their friends what they are thinking, a Quora-like tool is only for those who want to learn what their intellectual peers are saying on, or to research, a particular topic.  This is for the tech types—who dabble in technology and dream about things like startups and funding.

What is more likely to happen and makes far more sense is that a new generation of private, gated communities will grow and evolve.  This is where people with common interests will gather and exchange ideas.  For example, for people seeking legal advice, there is LawPivot, and for businesses looking for experts, there is Focus.   For techies, there are sites like StackOverflow, Slashdot, Hacker News; for children, there is Togetherville; for business students, there is PoetsandQuants; for entrepreneurs in India, there is StartupQnA; for Indian accountants, there is CAClubIndia; and China has its own groups, and so do many other countries.  Why do the Silicon Valley elite believe that everyone will flock to a U.S.-based tech site like Quora?

I am not delusional enough to believe that I can predict the future or guess what the technology landscape will look like a couple of years from now.  But I can make one educated guess.  My guess is that TechCrunch will stop talking about Quora within a few months and that we’ll be discussing the next big fad.

**Photo Credit: Andrew Fair

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

As we’re all well aware by now, the Q&A service Quora is exploding with growth. And while that may seem like a good thing, there are two distinct downsides. First, Quora is a pretty complex site and so scaling to accomodate huge user growth is difficult. And second, there has been a belief since the site launched to the public that as it grew more popular, the less useful it would become. Put another way, there’s a fear that it will turn into Yahoo Answers. Quora addressed the first issue a couple days ago. The second, co-founder Charlie Cheever addresses today on the service.

In a post entitled, “Commitment to Keeping Quora High Quality“, Cheever outlines the steps Quora is taking to ensure that the community remains the same great place for knowledge as it grows in size. So what are the steps? The biggest and most immediate one Cheever highlights is a better on-boarding process. Cheever notes that it can be difficult for new users to understand how to properly ask questions on the site. So they’ve created a tutorial quiz that walks them through the process before they submit the first question.

“So far, we’ve found that the quiz has helped make more of the questions that new users post conform to the site guidelines and require less editing from experienced users,” Cheever writes. He also notes that changes were made to both the homepage feed and the notification system yesterday to make both more manageable for new years (though he doesn’t detail what those changes are exactly).

In terms of the next few months, Cheever writes that resources are being put into:

• Educating new users about site policies and guidelines
• Improving the feed and voting ranking mechanisms
• Changing the core product to accomodate a Quora with many more users and many more questions and answers and topics
• Building special tools to support the efforts of reviewers and admins to improve the site and maintain civility and generally make it more fun to make Quora better

He also says that they’ll be working with site admins to help them deal with the growth as well.

All of that sounds good and addresses some of the issues that Mathew Ingram at GigaOM laid out yesterday in a post. Of course, Quora still has to execute. And fast. My new follower notifications don’t appear to be slowing down.

About a week ago, word started getting out that Facebook is beta testing a new “killer app” called Facebook Questions. For beta testers, the Questions feature appears in the left-hand column just below Events and Photos. It lets you ask and answer questions to and from your extended circle of friends.

A few days ago, Facebook opened up the private beta further and is now taking applications for anyone who wants to enter the beta. Facebook is taking its Questions product very seriously. “Help us build the future of Facebook,” reads the title of the page.

It puts the Questions product on par with Photos and Events.

As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.

All you have to do to become a beta tester is submit three sample questions, such as

• What are the main differences between Google Chrome and Internet Explorer?
• What are women looking for in a relationship?
• What methods has BP tried to clean up the oil spill?

In one fell swoop, Facebook is about to take on Yahoo Answers, Google (via recently acquired Aardvark), LinkedIn (notice the reference to job recruiters?), and Quora.  Q&A sites drive massive pageviews. It is an area Facebook can no longer ignore.  People already use Facebook informally to ask questions across their social network from time to time.  It is a type of status update, if you think about it.  The Questions feature will bucket all of these together, spread them across your friends and their friends, and make them searchable.

The advantage Facebook could have in the Q&A space is that to the extent that you find answers from your extended social network, questions can become the start of deeper conversations and spur new relationships. But breaking it out as a separate feature raises some new questions. Will every major type of status update now become its own feature on Facebook (like Photo and Event updates do)? And, if so, what’s next?

Navigation: The homepage’s navigation bar has four new tabs: Home, Browse Categories, My Activity, and About. Each of the tabs stays on every page you visit in Yahoo Answers. “Home” brings you to the homepage which includes a rotating Best of Answers feature, the link to the Answers Blog and more. “My activity” lets you access your Answers profile, and view your activity on the site. “About” features the Community Guidelines, answers leaderboard, Suggestion Board, and links to the Answers blog.

Browse Categories: Yahoo has redesigned the feature to browse answers by categories. On the previous version of the Answers homepage, all of the categories were displayed on the left hand column, which Yahoo says took up prime landscape on the homepage. Now, Categories is featured in a navigation tab within a hide-away menu. So you can always see the categories on any page via the drop down feature of the “Browse Categories” tab. And you can also lick on the tab j to be taken to the “All Categories” page. From this page, you can access all the questions that are open, resolved or in voting on the site.

Aesthetics: Yahoo has slightly changed the background color of the Answers page; toning down the green and replacing the white background with a light blue palate. Even the smiley icons have received a facelift. With the removal of the categories section, the homepage is a bit more cluttered and roomier. Yahoo says that the backend of the site has been fixed to eliminate a few bugs. Answer category leaderboards will now be updated on a daily basis instead of weekly.

While Yahoo Answers is still one of the leaders in the Q&A space, the site is now facing competition from startups who are innovating in the space, including Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake’s Hunch.

Here’s a question for you. How many Q&A sites does the Web really need? Already, there is Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, Mahalo Answers, Linkedin Answers, ChaCha and dozens beyond. But Wikia (and Wikipedia) co-founder Jimmy Wales thinks there is room for one more.

We learned from a tip that he has quietly launched Wikianswers, a Question & Answer site that attempts to create one true, consensus answer for each question, wiki-style. If this sounds familiar it is because Wiki Answers, which is part of Answers.com, does the exact same thing and had 26.7 million unique visitors worldwide in December (comScore). (Yahoo Answers had 144.7 million worldwide uniques in December).

And then there is the little problem of the name. It is supposed to be Wikia Answers! (see second screenshot below), but in the current logo the last “a” of Wikia shares the first “a” of Answers, making it Wikianswers. The already established WikiAnswers might have a problem with that. (The URLs are different: http://answers.wikia.com and http://wiki.answers.com/, respectively)

Update: Wikia Gil Penchina responds in comments:

Wikianswers started at Wikia in November, 2004. The other site with the same name was called FAQFarm back then and changed their name without getting our permission.

Wikianswers is built on the same wiki platform offered by Wikia, and it is already being promoted from Wikia Search. Building up a searchable Q&A repository is a natural add-on for a search engine or any online information database. (See our post on Mahalo Answers).

But, really, How is Wikianswers different than any other Answers site? Unless Wales can satisfy that question, people will ask look for answers to their own questions elsewhere.

Update: Wikia CEO Penchina’s explains below in comments:

Wikia’s Q+A service is in keeping with the wiki-way and that’s what makes it different
- The content is freely licensed under GFDL unlike other answers sites allowing it to be re-used and re-purposed by others for free
- Anyone can contribute (other answers sites require you to register)

We believe that a more open, freely licensed community will always do better than a corporate site that takes customers contributions and copyrights them in order to take rights away from the contributor.

But Yahoo has not done anything with the Yahoo Answers other than try to sell it. It still gets tons of traffic and you can get an answer to almost any question pretty much immediately, but its growth has stagnated since last April.

Yet Yahoo killed a promising project that could have made Yahoo Answers even better. It was called Answerpedia. The idea was to take the very best answers from Yahoo Answers (the top 5 or 10 percent) and institutionalize them as authoritative topic pages on their own wiki that could be edited and refined. Hence, Answerpedia (which was only ever used as the project’s codename).

In contrast to Wikipedia, Answerpedia was supposed to be a Wiki of experiential knowledge instead of historical fact. It was the place where people would go to find out things like , “What is the best way to get a reservation at a popular restaurant?” or “How do you go about planning for a kitchen remodel?”

Like many promising projects, Yahoo never let it get past the alpha stage. Maybe the next CEO will revive Answerpedia and other internal projects that never saw the light of day. (The halls of Yahoo are littered with them).

A lot of the answers on Yahoo Answers are worthless, but a small percentage are consistently brilliant. This is especially true in categories where many people have specific knowledge such as home repair, literature, finance, pets, cooking, and parenting. Yet these are also areas where search tends to fail or results are inundated with spam. Authoritative pages on these topics would get great search-engine juice and create the basis for a compelling new destination site within Yahoo as well.

If Yahoo doesn’t do this, someone else will. Already, startups are picking up the slack and experimenting with new ways to improve the core idea of a Q&A site. For instance, Mahalo Answers launched yesterday, adding virtual currency and embedding the best answers in its wiki topic pages. Wiki Answers also takes a collaborative approach to coming up with the best answer.

And what about Answerpedia? Well, for one thing, Yahoo does not own the URL. If you type in http://answerpedia.com/, it redirects you to Facebook, of all places (Update: The site now directs to a simple landing page). That might not be an issue, though, as all of Yahoo’s product use a Yahoo URL (like answerpedia.yahoo.com).

And here’s another curiosity. When I asked a question on Yahoo Answers about what it was and why it never launched, “Yahoo Products” came up a suggested category for the question. As for why it never launched, I am still waiting for an answer to that one.

Update: And we have an answer from someone who says he is one of the founding engineers of Yahoo Answers:

Answerspedia would have been more peanut butter =)

Maybe, but there is a difference between spreading yourself too thin and just sitting on the ball.

Yahoo Answers, which was launched in late 2005, is a staggeringly huge site. Recent Comscore stats say the service attracts nearly 150 million monthly visitors worldwide and generates 1.3 billion monthly page views. That’s 67% unique visitor growth in the last year. Yahoo as a whole, though, has nearly 100 billion monthly page views, so it isn’t a material percentage of total Yahoo traffic.

Yahoo Answers doesn’t bring in the premium advertising rates that other properties command, so it isn’t crazy that they’d try to sell it if the price was right. But the logistics of a transfer would be a nightmare – You have to have a Yahoo account to log in, for example. And all the URLs are on Yahoo’s domain name. One of the reasons the service gets so much traffic is because questions tend to get very high search engine placement, so redirecting those URLs properly would be of utmost importance.

There are very few buyers out there that would both be interested in getting those low-CPM page views and would have the cash on hand to make the purchase. So like I said, this is ridiculous on its face, except that we have two independent sources claiming its very much not ridiculous.

Along with the party, Yahoo is publishing data from a Harris Interactive survey, showing how people are using online Q&A sites like Answers. The survey shows that one in three online adults have used a Q&A site, and of these, half say that information from a Q&A site has influenced a decision they have made.

According to the Harris survey, 55 percent of adults would prefer to have their questions answered from a group of individuals rather than an individual response from a friend or family member. And of course, users indicated that that they’d prefer the answers forum to be free with 81 percent saying that they would look to the Internet for answers if the service was free and 77 percent saying that they would look to the Internet if they knew they would receive instantaneous responses.

For this data, Harris surveyed 2,303 adults between November 27 and 29, which, ironically, is the same day that Google announced that they would close their answers program.

With BitWine, users deem themselves experts in specific categories and establish their per-minute consulting fee. Then when another curious user needs an answer about a given topic, they can browse the experts in that category, select someone whose price and expertise they prefer, and Skype them live. As soon as the transaction is over, the “expert” is paid via PayPal.

We spoke with BitWine co-founder Alon Cohen today, trying to figure out why this site is necessary and how it is different than Yahoo! Answers or Google Answers.

“When you look at Google Answers and Yahoo Answers, you don’t really know who is answering because it’s chat based and text based,” Cohen said. “For instance, I asked a question last night and I had to rephrase the question three times for people to understand me. One question and one answer is usually not enough. You need a visual conversation with someone you trust.”

On BitWine, experts get ratings based on their consultancy performance. Cohen sees this as a way for people to make money in their spare time off of their random hobbies. After all, where else are you going to sell your consulting services on model ship making or knitting?

Sites like this really are only as good as their community size. What good is an “operators are standing by” scenario, when no one is calling in?

“This is a big issue that we have many concerns about: the chicken and the egg,” Cohen said. “You want experts there to begin with and you want enough traffic there so that the experts will stay.”

He said the company will target experts through blogs and discussion forums and also attempt to create affiliations with other Web sites’ questions pages.

BitWine was founded by Cohen, who was previously the co-founder of VocalTec, a VoIP company, and Elad Baron, who recently sold his company, Whale Communications, to Microsoft.

Developers will be able to access YA data by user, search keyword, or category. The company says the API is almost identical to the interface used internally to create the recent Yahoo! Messenger/ Yahoo! Answers combo and the flash badge that Yahoo! offers.

The Yahoo! Messenger plug-ins program has seen some amazing things developed. It will be very cool to see if developers can make good use of this newest API.

See also our profile of Yedda, a similar service with a big 2.0 twist and today’s announcement of the new Facebook API.

Questions will be posed to users by the following:

• Marilyn vos Savant, the holder of world’s highest IQ, begins the promotion today with a question about the best way to help kids in school.
• Friday through Sunday will be your chance to answer a question from Donald Trump, in exchange for a $5,000 spending account.
• CNBC’s finance guru Suze Orman’s prize is 3 oz of pure gold.
• Click and Clack, or Tom and Ray Magliozzi from NPR’s Car Talk will participate. The prize for their question is free gas for a year. And all you get for Donald Trump’s question is $5,000!
• Arrianna Huffington will pose a query about News and Events, the winner will get a trip for two to DC. Thrilling.
• Al Gore’s question is tied to a free 2006 Prius.
• Stephan Hawking’s social science question gets one person a trip to the Smithsonian.
• Bono will close the event and Yahoo! will donate $25k to his One campaign in honor of the winner.

It’s called Ask The Planet, but the company claims that it is legally prohibited from give prizes to anyone outside the US. That’s liable to raise some ire. In fact, for having a name like that, the campaign seems pretty US centered. Likewise, in the spirit of mass page views – I mean scientific inquiry, it appears that the winners will be selected at random and users are encouraged to offer more replies for greater chances to win. The company plans to plaster ads for the campaign all over the US. None the less, looks like an interesting campaign that’s liable to raise the profile of Yahoo! Answers significantly. Is asking your audience to all throw their answers in a hat the best way to solve the world’s most vexing problems? Call me cynical, but I’m not sure it is.