After last month I covered how kick ass Yahoo Answers still is amongst the social Q&A services, I guess I should also talk about its younger gaining momentum salient alternative, Quora. After all, I would never want to be like one of those old fellows which are still using Internet Explorer and thinking that MySpace is hip.
Quora benefited from a huge leap in visitors over the past 12 months, although it still only has a fraction of the traffic as Yahoo Answers. comScore reported a few weeks ago that the site had 3x the traffic within one year, hosting 1.5 million questioners and answerers in July. Or like us hipsters likes to call it, neato!
But unlike the fossil Yahoo Answers, Quora is now trying to ride on its wave of momentum in a modern way. Quora has announced it will make it easier for publishers to add contents from the Q&A site into their own pages with a new feature called “Embedded Quotes”.
The rhetorical name of the feature pretty much already explains what is it all about, but here are some few more details: When a publisher wants to copy some content from Quora into his/her/its (some publishers are dogs and not the cute kind) own web page, he/she/it would have two options to do so conveniently:
- By clicking on an “Embed” button at the bottom of the post, they will receive a code to embed the post in full.
- By selecting only a part of the post (clickthrough the desired part) and clicking on the popping “Embed Quote” button, they will receive a code to embed the selected part.
So far, in spite of endless grovelling posts from Silicon Valley’s tech blogs (suck it gutless bloggers), Quora still hasn’t managed to brand itself as the large social community as the blogs painting it, even with the aforementioned growing popularity.
However, that doesn’t mean that Quora has some branding or other problem, because the site is indeed a great socially engaging and intuitive product. It just that like in so many other frenzy cases, the tech blogosphere overly inflates and bloats products beyond its actual proportions (see Facebook’s case).
Quora is an awesome social Q&A community but it still hasn’t reached to the ample scope as some portray. Perhaps (I would even dare to say possibly) the new Embedded Quotes feature will help it stretch there.
If you don’t agree with me that currently Yahoo Answers still dominating the Q&A arena, you can express your opinion in the discussion I’ve started on Quora (but in general you can bite me).