Quora
Encyclopedia
Quora is a question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users. The site was founded in June 2009, launched in private beta in December 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010.
Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics and allows users to collaborate on them by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers. Quora's main competitors are social bookmarking
sites like reddit
, social networking sites like ChaCha
, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn
, Formspring, Answerbag
and Answers.com
, and expert question-answer communities like the Stack Exchange.
employees, Adam D'Angelo
and Charlie Cheever
. D'Angelo quit his position at Facebook in January 2010 to create Quora and said he was inspired to create Quora because he thought: "that Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet." Quora's base of users grew quickly in December 2010.
Quora had half a million users in January 2011. In June 2011, Quora redesigned its website, in order to make information discovery and navigation easier. Nevertheless some critics said that the redesign was inspired by Wikipedia
. Unofficial apps based on the Quora API have been released for the Android and iOS platforms.
, valuing the start-up at $86 million. Quora's valuation was more than 1 billion dollars in 2011. Quora has reportedly turned down several billion dollar acquisition offers, as reported by Business Insider
.
and Facebook
accounts. Quora users can upvote or downvote answers. They can also suggest edits to existing answers provided by other users. The Quora community includes several well known people like Steve Case
, Marc Andreesen, Dustin Moskovitz
, Jimmy Wales
and Justin Trudeau
.. The majority of Quora users are located in Silicon Valley
, followed by New York City
.
Quora uses Pylons and Comet
for its backend and Ubuntu Linux as its operating system with MySQL
as its database. It also uses Git
and memcached
. Quora uses Nginx
as a reverse proxy server and HAProxy for load balancing. Quora has developed its own algorithm for ranking the answers, which works on similar principles to PageRank
. Quora uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
technology to host the servers that run their website.
, Time Magazine and The Daily Telegraph
.
According to Robert Scoble
, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter
, Facebook
, Google Wave
and various websites that employ a system of users voting content up. Scoble later criticized Quora, however, saying that it was a "horrid service for blogging," and while it was a decent question and answer website, it was not substantially better than competing sites. The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom
has predicted that Quora will go on to become larger than Twitter
in the future. Quora, along with Airbnb
and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multibillion dollar start-ups by the New York Times.
The founders of Quora, Charlie Cheever
and Adam D'Angelo
have been named among the top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs by inc.com, as well as being named among the smartest people in the technology industry by CNN
.
Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics and allows users to collaborate on them by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers. Quora's main competitors are social bookmarking
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources online. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren't shared, merely bookmarks that reference them....
sites like reddit
Reddit
reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...
, social networking sites like ChaCha
ChaCha (search engine)
ChaCha is a search engine that specializes in answering questions through a technique known as the human search engine. ChaCha was created by Scott A. Jones and Brad Bostic...
, Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a business-related social networking site. Founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. , LinkedIn reports more than 120 million registered users in more than 200 countries and territories. The site is available in English, French,...
, Formspring, Answerbag
Answerbag
Answerbag is a collaborative online database of FAQs, where questions are asked and answered by users. Instead of the one question—one answer model, multiple answers to a given question are presented, in descending order of user ratings. As of December 2006, Answerbag was the second largest...
and Answers.com
Answers.com
Answers.com is an Internet-based knowledge exchange, which includes WikiAnswers, ReferenceAnswers, VideoAnswers, and five international language Q&A communities. The Answers.com domain name was purchased by Bill Gross and Henrik Jones at idealab in 1996. The domain name was acquired by NetShepard...
, and expert question-answer communities like the Stack Exchange.
History
Quora was co-founded by two former FacebookFacebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
employees, Adam D'Angelo
Adam D'Angelo
Adam D'Angelo is the chief executive and co-founder of Quora, an online knowledge market based in Palo Alto, California.He was chief technology officer of Facebook, and also served as its vice president of engineering.He left Facebook in 2008...
and Charlie Cheever
Charlie Cheever
Charlie Cheever is the co-founder, along with Adam D'Angelo, of Quora, an online knowledge market. He was formerly an engineer and manager at Facebook, where he oversaw the creation of Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform. Previous to Facebook Cheever was employed by Amazon.com in Seattle...
. D'Angelo quit his position at Facebook in January 2010 to create Quora and said he was inspired to create Quora because he thought: "that Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet." Quora's base of users grew quickly in December 2010.
Quora had half a million users in January 2011. In June 2011, Quora redesigned its website, in order to make information discovery and navigation easier. Nevertheless some critics said that the redesign was inspired by Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
. Unofficial apps based on the Quora API have been released for the Android and iOS platforms.
Financials
In March 2010 Quora received $11 million in funding from Benchmark CapitalBenchmark Capital
Benchmark Capital is a venture capital firm responsible for the early stage funding of some very successful startups. In 1997, the firm invested $6.7 million in eBay, which became worth more than $5 billion by the spring of 1999. Other high-profile investments include Ariba, Juniper Networks, Red...
, valuing the start-up at $86 million. Quora's valuation was more than 1 billion dollars in 2011. Quora has reportedly turned down several billion dollar acquisition offers, as reported by Business Insider
Business Insider
Business Insider is a U.S. business/entertainment news website launched in February 2009. Founded by DoubleClick Founder and former C.E.O. Kevin P. Ryan it is the overarching brand beneath which fall the Silicon Alley Insider and Clusterstock verticals...
.
Website
Quora requires its users to register with their real names and requires them to reveal their real identities. Although it is possible to remain anonymous on Quora, anonymity is strongly discouraged. It is also possible for Quora users to link their Quora accounts with their TwitterTwitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
and Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
accounts. Quora users can upvote or downvote answers. They can also suggest edits to existing answers provided by other users. The Quora community includes several well known people like Steve Case
Steve Case
Stephen McConnell "Steve" Case is an American businessman best known as the co-founder and former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online . Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to build a variety of new businesses through his investment...
, Marc Andreesen, Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz
Dustin Moskovitz is an American internet entrepreneur who co-founded the social networking website Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes. Moskovitz owns a 6% share of Facebook. He is also a co-founder and the CEO of Asana. Moskovitz is Jewish...
, Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
and Justin Trudeau
Justin Trudeau
Justin Pierre James Trudeau, MP is a Canadian politician. He has represented the Montreal electoral division of Papineau in the Canadian House of Commons since 2008 as a member of the Liberal Party and currently serves as the party's critic for youth, post-secondary education, and amateur...
.. The majority of Quora users are located in Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
, followed by New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
Quora uses Pylons and Comet
Comet (programming)
Comet is a web application model in which a long-held HTTP request allows a web server to push data to a browser, without the browser explicitly requesting it. Comet is an umbrella term, encompassing multiple techniques for achieving this interaction. All these methods rely on features included by...
for its backend and Ubuntu Linux as its operating system with MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
as its database. It also uses Git
Git
Git may refer to:* Git , a British English term of abuse* Git , a distributed version control system* Git , by Skeletons & The Girl-Faced Boys...
and memcached
Memcached
In computing, memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal, but is now used by many other sites. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the...
. Quora uses Nginx
Nginx
nginx is a Web server and a reverse proxy server for HTTP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols, with a strong focus on high concurrency, performance and low memory usage. It is licensed under a BSD-like license and it runs on Unix, Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows.- Overview...
as a reverse proxy server and HAProxy for load balancing. Quora has developed its own algorithm for ranking the answers, which works on similar principles to PageRank
PageRank
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set...
. Quora uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a central part of Amazon.com's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services . EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications...
technology to host the servers that run their website.
Reception
Quora has been praised by several publications such as New York Times, USA TodayUSA Today
USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...
, Time Magazine and The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
.
According to Robert Scoble
Robert Scoble
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. He has three children; one from a previous...
, Quora succeeded in combining attributes of Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
, Google Wave
Google Wave
Apache Wave is a software framework for real-time collaborative editing online. Google Inc. originally developed it as Google Wave.It was announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009....
and various websites that employ a system of users voting content up. Scoble later criticized Quora, however, saying that it was a "horrid service for blogging," and while it was a decent question and answer website, it was not substantially better than competing sites. The Daily Telegraph of the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
has predicted that Quora will go on to become larger than Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
in the future. Quora, along with Airbnb
Airbnb
Airbnb is an online service that matches people seeking vacation rentals and other short-term accommodations with those with rooms to rent, generally private parties that are not professional hoteliers. The site was founded in August 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. In July 2011, the company...
and Dropbox, has been named among the next generation of multibillion dollar start-ups by the New York Times.
The founders of Quora, Charlie Cheever
Charlie Cheever
Charlie Cheever is the co-founder, along with Adam D'Angelo, of Quora, an online knowledge market. He was formerly an engineer and manager at Facebook, where he oversaw the creation of Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform. Previous to Facebook Cheever was employed by Amazon.com in Seattle...
and Adam D'Angelo
Adam D'Angelo
Adam D'Angelo is the chief executive and co-founder of Quora, an online knowledge market based in Palo Alto, California.He was chief technology officer of Facebook, and also served as its vice president of engineering.He left Facebook in 2008...
have been named among the top 30 under 30 entrepreneurs by inc.com, as well as being named among the smartest people in the technology industry by CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
.