Quo Vadis, Quora?

A million mailboxes were seemingly seeded with Quora invites over the last few days (grassroots or astroturf? the jury is still out, the question unanswered), a million flowers thenceforth bloomed, and our twitterstream filled up with irritating autotwts..

A quick aside on Crowdsourced Q&A services - they have been touted as "alternate search" for years, but crowdsourciing answers has its own problems. Their history is one of being useful at first, but dying under the weight of spurious questions, cr*p answers and pure spam over time. But it is a good time now, as those that launched before did it against a background of Google search being effective, but that is not so much the case anymore - so timing is propitious.

Here is the Broadstuff's take on its probable future therefore:

1. Quora is just the next iteration for the "group answering" service, it's hard to tell if it is any better in workflow terms to what has gone before - nothing jumps out right now.

2. Right now its fun because its new and small, there is thus a minimum of spam and spurious answers, and all the "cool people" are on it talking about what they like to talk about, so it's the new new shiny thing

3. If the past is anything to go by, however, if it takes off it will fill up with dumb punters and spam.

4. In that case, if not controlled, the answers will become less useful (see Yahoo Answers et al) and people will stop using it

So the key task for the team is to build the system such that dumb punter impacts are mitigated, that spam is minimised, and that - above all - the service gives enough good answers to questions. Do this, and there is an alternative search system in the making, Fail to do do and it joins the ghost town question services out there, with their tumbleweeds of hanging, unanswered questions except for spam replies. Personally I have always felt that the way to do this is rank the answerers as well as the answers and allow user filtering.

However, I do fail to see the difference between these services and a million "vertical" system on Yahoo groups and various web services, with the exception that you only join one service here rather than all those verticals - but then you also have to deal with unfocussed answers and grockles (Having read quite a few threads, I cannot say that the answers are of higher quality than I have seen anywhere else, but at least at the moment there are answers).

So good luck....they will need it.

Update - Good Lord - a Techcrunch story critiqueing it a tad (TechCrunch has been promoting Quora something awful!)

Update - and now, 3 weeks later, a GigaOm story in the face of universal "meh" We salute thee, PR team of Quora, but you are turning it into a bit of case study!