Quora and Why It Is Different

Quora and Why It Is Different

Let me start with the three major building blocks on the internet that are building not just networks but also relations

1. Facebook quenches the thirst of humans for social interaction
2. Twitter enables to shout endlessly and whatever they want
3. Quora tells them, if you have something worth to share to what people want to know, make a knowledge base out of it

 

What are the main center points or pivots on which all above three reside?
A pivot is what the whole concept relies on and has taken a leap from there but in all the cases, the pivot will always stay the same, as it creates the foundation for each of the above entities

 

Facebook (www.facebook.com)
Pivot is people.

Revolves around people and their networks and their wants, doing, opinions, thinking, mistakes, changes etc
Signifies the early stage of human evolution when we wanted to be in groups.

Internet taking over as a parallel life form for all of us, we all want to be there. So we evolved here too. In groups, n in network we stay happy. Believe me for the depressed person, or one who is alone, or thinks nobody cares about him/her is given facebook, it would really ease up his feeling of seclusion and depression. You wanted to be known, and recognised as a face and as a person, and more by your friends and what they also do.

 

Twitter (www.twitter.com)
Pivot is temporal relevant/irrelevant events/happenings/cribbings/sharings

Signifies a human being basic need to shout and let others know that I also exist, and I have lot of share, take what you want, or don't take, it doesn't matter to me

Revolves around nothing, truly nothing. Just like a shoutcast where you shout what comes to your mind. Place/time/purpose/audience is irrelevant unless the tweet is targeted to a specific "tweeple". In this case there is a mention of the specific tweeple while tweeting. So if the particular tweeple gets back to you, its good, its nice and useful.
Tweeple is what a person who is in the twitterific-universe called as.
Overtime, twitter gathered huge noise and useless tweets. Everybody wanted to shout even if nobody was listening. Next phase was that nobody is listening to what you are saying. Everybody just wanted to shout. When a lot of API's started automation of tweeting from other platforms, it became a "shout-hub"

 

Quora (www.quora.com)
Pivot is Authentic and Voluntary creation of knowledge bases, that will have multiple touch points (questions) but will still be connected sematically to each other

Quora has a clean interface and simplistic design. It is not re-inventing the wheel, by having its own user base, but is relying on already authenticated networks of Facebook and Twitter. And anyways, every sane guy in this world has opened their doors, to FB and TW integration, because if they don't they are gonna lag behind
That way, it is trying to ensure that the userbase is going to be authetic since current user creation onf Quora is on invite basis.

Here you will find that although your answer is getting voted, or can be voted, you are not driven by that fact. But you are driven by the fact that you need to put authentic opinions and information in the conversation.

 

What is the difference? Isnt wikipedia better than this?.Wikipedia is a fact-building machine. Whereas Quora is a authentic conversaton building machine, that focuses on semantic connections.

 

Although there are various other ways to interpret Quora. One being the fact that it does help you get in touch with people who think, read, write and are interested in similar things as you are. Which in terms means that even if there is no hidden agenda of creating a social network, it will still get created, making sure authentic people who share similar interests contribute effectively

Another thing that went dead was Google Wave. If you closely see Quora, it has similar looks of that of GW, but more clean and less cluttered. Had GW made itself open to FB and TW integration with a better interface, who knows it might have been a success

 

Did we forget LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is there to stay. As I was FB-iscussing with a friend today morning, LinkedIn is more business focused and hence premium memberships are there on it, and it will never go away. Because the purpose of LinkedIn is pure busines connections and networking and promote ones professional status.

You can never have premium memberships on Facebook, Twitter and Quora. This would entirely defeat the purpose of all these networks and collaboration tools.

Views and comments are invited