I love beer. I’m just not proficient at making at it. The first pale ale my friend and I home-brewed was a bust before it hit the bottle (contaminated due to human error). Our second batch? Flatter than Kansas. Googling around cursorily, I found a wealth of opinion online as to why — much of it conflicting or too general to help. What’s an amateur brewer to do?
Enter Quora, the latest website that allows users to pose and answer questions in topical categories ranging from "Canadian History" to "Pizza in New York City." While Wikipedia continues to build its herculean database of lengthy objective articles, sites like Quora are accumulating consensus user-edited knowledge — some of it subjective — in a streamlined Q&A format. If someone’s already put forth the same query, you’re in luck. If not, ask and ye shall receive.
The idea isn’t novel. Google Questions and Answers launched in 2002 (and shuttered in 2007). Yahoo! Answers launched in 2005 and is still going strong. At least a dozen other more-established services currently compete in the space, including Formspring, ChaCha, Hunch, StackOverflow, Aardvark (a k a Vark) and Mahalo Answers. All these sites do is amplify and organize the collaborative info-sharing that has existed online since early message-boards and comment threads — just with a few more bells and whistles. But while the algorithms running these various sites may be proprietary, the engineers aren’t reinventing the wheel. “Every algorithm has its own unique flavor,” WikiAnswers CEO Bob Rosenschein tells me, “But there is a lot of overlap in the technologies.” Programmers are applying known sorting techniques; they’re not, for instance, creating wholly new cluster technologies out of thin air. In other words: No company’s innovating this space with software alone.
“Making sense of all the knowledge people are putting onto the Internet is a pretty tricky problem,” says Quora co-founder Charlie Cheevers, “But I don’t think this is going to be a fight to the death, where there will only be one site standing at the end.”
So how did Quora, which launched publicly last June, land $14 million in funding from Benchmark Capital?
The answer is, well, not that simple.
The site was founded by two former Facebook engineers, Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever. While at the social network, they worked with Facebook’s former VP of Product Management, Matt Cohler, who is — wait for it — now a partner at Benchmark. I learned about this on Quora under the question “Who invested in Quora?”
Sure, this may sound like gossip, but it actually illustrates Quora’s big strength: community. Any website can solicit questions. If convincing experts to answer them (for free) is an accomplishment, then getting, say, the CEO of Netflix to answer a query about Netflix is a total coup. From the outset, when Quora launched privately last spring, that’s what it did: land contributions from the Silicon Valley elite, a community not exactly known for its abundance of spare cycles.
“Our focus is on the everyman, the 300 million average people in the U.S.,” says WikiAnswers’ Rosenschein, “But I have to say, I do wish I had more CEOs writing answers for us.”
Of course, audiences and even power-users can be fickle. Scalability is key, which means a niche audience alone won’t cut it. Charlie Cheevers, Quora’s co-founder, says that Quora’s traffic is growing steadily, though he won’t share numbers. He also disputes a recent dip in traffic reported by Compete.com.
The power of its network alone won’t make Quora a sustainable business either. Though Cheevers tells me the company is far more focused on community and functionality (the social networking aspect alone distinguishes Quora from many of its competitors), it's not ignoring the question of a viable revenue stream. With more than one hundred times the traffic, WikiAnswers pulls in an estimated $20 million or more every year from Google’s AdSense.
All of this is fine and well. But what about my beer quandary?
I uploaded the same question to several services, including Quora. My qualitative experiences couldn’t have varied more. On Yahoo! Answers, I received a number of anonymous curt replies that weren’t useful. Why? Users are awarded points simply for responding to questions. This explains why other services rely on less-overt gaming mechanics. ChaCha bombarded me with eight anonymous text messages, which suggested that carbonation can be a matter of adding sugar to the beer before bottling (helpful). They also included juicy tidbits like “Beer is the world's most widely consumed and probably the oldest of alcoholic beverages.” (GOOD. TO. KNOW.) On StackOverflow, I posted my question to the “homebrew” category, but a user e-mailed later to inform me that space is for homebrew as in software, not beer (doh!). Before I could pose my own query on Formspring, the site prompted me to answer a personality assessment quiz, including “Who is the most sexiest woman alive?” (Next!) Some clown on Aardvark instructed me to “Add more malt, [and] tell people it's a stout.” (In case you don’t know anything about beer, stout is generally flat).
By far, the quickest and best information came via Facebook Answers and Quora. It is worth noting, though, that more folks chimed in on Quora than on Facebook — and, to be honest, none of the info sounded all that definitive.
In the end, I picked up the phone and dialed the shop where I buy brewing supplies. Turns out I shouldn’t have refrigerated my bottles soon after bottling. If you want to learn why, the Q&A is posted to Quora.