Quora, the social question and answer site that was all the rage in 2009, has raised $50 million as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and an early Facebook investor, was one of the main contributors, along with Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo who put $20 million of his own money. Will this give Quora the infusion of capital necessary to regain its web buzz and begin to monetize?
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In Facebook IPO, Frenzy, Skepticism (The Wall Street Journal)
Facebook’s coming initial public offering has set off a frenzy of anticipation among Main Street and Wall Street investors desperate to get their hands on the stock. Late Monday, the social network raised the price range for its IPO to $34 to $38 a share, from $28 to $35 a share, said a person familiar with the matter, in a sign of investor appetite for the offering. Inside Facebook Facebook has announced a new design for its mobile newsfeed that displays posts in individual boxes similar to how they appear on timeline. As part of the redesign, photos now appear three times larger than before, which could make browsing more efficient since there is less need to tap to see an image full-screen. Yahoo! News/The Lookout Is Facebook a flash in the pan? Nearly half of Americans think so, according to a new AP/CNBC poll. Forty-six percent of those polled said the social networking giant is likely to “fade away as new things come along,” while 43 percent predict it will be “successful over the long term.” CNBC The poll also shows that 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity AllFacebook Recent college graduate Suleika Jaouad found out that when she opened up about having leukemia on Facebook, there was a community ready to embrace her as she faced this new challenge in life. Caretakers and fellow cancer patients, friends and family all were there waiting to offer support and share advice. Read more
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Bing Reinvents Social Search and Discovery (Mashable)
Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. AllFacebook The new Bing will gradually be rolled out to users, and those interested in getting it earlier can sign up. The search engine makes its suggestions based on information in friends’ Facebook profiles, their likes and photos they have shared. The New York Times Strengthening the ties between Bing and Facebook is a sign of how Microsoft and Facebook are working together to provide a counterbalance to their common adversary, Google. While Google is by far the dominant player in the Internet search business, it also competes with Microsoft in productivity applications and with Facebook through its Google+ social network. The Wall Street Journal Microsoft’s share of U.S. Web search was 15.3 percent in March, according to comScore, while Google had a 66.4 percent share. Combined with Yahoo!, for which Bing also powers search, Microsoft had a combined 29 percent market share. Forbes In 2007, Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, which goes public next week. And the two nabbed headlines in October 2010 by announcing their plan to team up on social search. Read more
The social web empowers people who would once be cut off from the world to connect with others and maintain social ties. This can get tricky when we talk about offering this freedom to convicted felons, but a a San Francisco program called “The Last Mile” is attempting to leverage the web and social media to help train inmates. The program trains selected inmates for eventual employment as a paid intern in Silicon Valley, and one of their training programs is responding to users’ questions about prison on Quora.
Quora has not been making as big a splash as it once did. Founded in 2009, the site was once a very buzz-worthy representative of emerging social networks, but its thunder was stolen by Tumblr and now Pinterest. That said, the question and answer format at Quora has always been attractive to business people, startups and technology experts. Today, a Quora analyst revealed some statistics that say that Quora is not just for business — people are talking about all sorts of subjects over there.
In a cool move by inspired by Kat Li over at Quora, Moviefone and Quora have partnered up to promote Hunger Games and reach out to readers and potential movie watchers. Moviefone will be taking one Hunger Games question from Quora each day and highlighting the best answers on their site. The Quora discussion around the upcoming movie and already completed book trilogy is massive, and the questions and answers are interesting and insightful.
A user on Quora asked, “What was the true genesis of Craigslist?” Wikipedia can answer that: before Craigslist became became a goldmine of (mostly real) apartment listings and garage sale items in 50 countries, it was a simple email distribution list for friends who met up at events in the San Fransisco Bay area. But it turns out that many friends of the site, including founder Craig Newmark, had a Quora account and some time on their hands for an online reunion.
Have you ever used Quora before to solve an unanswered question or start a conversation about an interesting topic? As a platform, Quora allows its community to post and answer questions about anything of their choosing to gain collective knowledge. One way to take advantage of this question and answer based feedback is using it for your day to day researching needs.
Late last week Google quietly rolled out a feature where Google asks you if you want to ask a question related to your current search query, and it then posts the question on Google+. It doesn’t look like they’re providing any special interface for the question, but it does make you wonder whether this will threaten Quora’s social Q&A service.
While Quora may not be the hottest new kid on the block anymore, they’ve been admirably building their service with relative humility over the last year. After introducing the fascinating gamification inspired Ask to Answer and Credits features a few weeks ago they’ve now updated their service to emphasize the people answering the questions by adding a “Follow” button.
As a user of the service, I can say that I’ve definitely found myself looking around for this feature in the past, especially considering Quora’s elite attendance list. From founders to artists to designers, I’ve found some of the most interesting people online at Quora, and would love to follow their answers and see how much time they spend per day procrastinating on a social network.
The button will also be available for topics.
The follow button, of course, is a service that was first inspired by Twitter and has now become standard fare on any social network. Even Facebook has introduced the concept of subscribing and unsubscribing, and the button will fit well on Quora — new users will probably assume it’s been there from the start.
I can imagine Quora will have to continue to refine their site in the near future, as it seems like clones have begun to pop up. We covered Beepl, a Q&A site which integrates with FB and Twitter, yesterday and are curious to see whether any big networks will introduce a formal Q&A section of their sites. Just as Facebook’s check-ins threatened Foursquare, so would it be if they put attention into a Questions service.
