Why is Quora given so much attention?
To me, Quora is almost the ultimate non-story. There's nothing technically noteworthy about the idea or the platform.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Another way to put this is that it's a bubble story: journalists and Valleywags think it's much bigger than it is because all the other people in the same bubble talk about it. Outside of SV/SF, nobody really knows nor cares.
It's a bit like the AT&T-iPhone story. Sure it sucks in SF/NY (it really does) but journalists and bloggers seem incapable or uninterested in considering that these two cities are representative of the whole country.
Last year Quora got funding at a staggering $86M [1] (this sounds like post-money). It's Yahoo Answers meets Facebook, which just so happens to have an insider audience that won't necessarily translate more broadly. Frankly, I'd sell before people catch on.
[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/quora-has-the-magic-benchma...
Don't quite agree, I think their real-time update system excellent and sets them apart. It definitely (IMO) makes the site more addicting. Not that it couldn't be written by competitors of course
I don't disagree that Quora is overhyped though, they seem be Techcrunch's pet company of 2011.
The only thing Quora has done well (and they have done really well at this) is to get Valley insiders to use it.
Replace "Quora" with "Hacker News" and you'll see how valuable getting Valley insiders to use it can be. It's the community.
Obligatory wikipedia background:
"WELL membership is available to almost anyone, but requires a paid subscription and use of one's real name."
"The WELL was frequently mentioned in the media in the 1980s and 1990s, probably disproportionately to the number of users it had relative to other online systems. [...] This early visibility was largely the result of the early policy of providing free — comped — accounts for interesting journalists and other select members of the media. As a result, for many journalists it was their first experience of online systems and, later, the Internet, even though other systems existed."
Not much happened with them, either.
For example the discussions of many business models on Quora are unsurpassed in quality anywhere else on the web.