Quora really is fascinating

This thread caught my eye:

On the same page, we've got a well-known VC, the head of UberSocial (formerly called UberTwitter) and Twitter's Communications director discussing the news about Twitter blocking UberSocial's apps from accessing its API.

Where formerly such discussion would have taken place in fragmented parts of the internet, notably through blogs (and to a certain extent it has), we can see the story unfolding in front of our eyes on Quora, which somehow serves as a neutral discussion forum. The inclusion of Quora answers in the Techmeme stream makes them even more prominent and better distributed.

All this is amazing. Twitter and blogs had removed a lot of news intermediation, but one still had to go from pundits to individual tweets to bloggers to get a full picture. Here we've got an example of the full picture creating itself in one central location. I guess Quora can now officially be seen as the future of the future of news :-)

UPDATE
The topic of online Q&A is heating up lately:
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Comments

Ed Daniek
Not so much wishing to say "me too!" but yeah, in this particular incident I also found and read this Quora thread. This was primarily because I'm a user of Twidroyd and saw, courtesy of Tim Bray's tweet, that they were supposed to be back again yet my app still wasn't behaving like that was the case. A google search took me straight to the Quora thread and I was somewhat surprised, as were you I believe, to find this discourse although the sceptic in me made me think this was clever use of social media by Mr. Gross.

For what it's worth, I confess that having suffered social media fatigue for well over 9 years now any new service that arrives on the scene is met by a significant amount of apathy on my part - I don't wish these new ideas to fail, I am just significantly demotivated to add my support through participation to each and every social spin out there - bottom-line I don't have the time so while I note that tools such as Quora are gaining ground I much prefer, where possible, to support open source related ventures like StatusNet that are giving a lot more back to the ecosystem in which I invest most of my time.

Guillaume Lerouge
Indeed. The issue with tools such as Status.Net is that they tend to be followers that come after a leader has already emerged (in this case Twitter). While I can see a valid use case for using and deploying Status.Net software within the enterprise, I'm not sure it has reached a wide enough audience in its public version to gather the same kind of interesting comment that services such as Quora and Twitter get.
Ed Daniel
Your point is very salient, first-mover advantage and audience is a significant aspect when reaching out though beyond the audience and in search of wisdom one may not always find the gems so easily in one ultimate haystack, especially when that haystack is the 'mass' populous.

I guess it's a question of prerogatives per se - I still find that LinkedIn Q&A is particularly compelling and I do not hesitate to use it.

Another aspect is that I am less prone to the uniqueness of any one thing - the value of brand for an emerging social technology that is a trendsetter which exploits 'net effects' does create an almost impossible hill to climb for competitors though I would not say expect that interesting commentary can only be found amongst the leaders (consider blog diversity for example), it is often just as equally distributed amongst other contenders demonstrating a choice that people will exert over the solutions they adopt.

PS. I'm sure you know this but I thought it relevant to reiterate here.

MarkDilley
Ed - I tend to go check things out and not give too much to them. With Quora I am giving it a second, third, fourth look - because there is somewhat of a wiki ethos and maybe even wiki functionality there. It might be the freshest thing in wiki that I have seen in a while. Best, Mark
Guillaume Lerouge
As for the wiki ethos, I believe StackOverflow also has a fresh take on the wiki component, mixing Q&Q with the surfacing of relevant answers at the top of the page and the ability for users to suggest edits to existing answers in order to improve them.

What's interesting with both tools is how they also integrate a social / reputation component in order to let users find what their peers are interested about and find out who experts on any given topic are. Both of these are a clear advancement over most typical wikis.

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