Quora is what Ask.com (AskJeeves) always wanted to be… but it’s not really anyone’s fault. If anything you could argue that AskJeeves was about 10 years too early for the perfect conditions to truly flourish. Disclaimer: I am jumping the shark. Who’s to say Quora is anything but a flash in the pan with a great team tackling a big problem in a legit bubble of hype. But then again, that’s why blogs are here… for a seemingly unqualified observer to prognosticate their opinion to an open mind.
This phenomenon of curiosity is prevalent everywhere we look, from a think tank in DC to a church congregation on Sunday to a dog sniffing new territory. At its most basic level, it’s curiosity of a subject that evokes action. A dog sniffs around the park because there is an element of unknown and the desire to discover the unknown is innate. In the simple mind of a dog, I would imagine the process goes somewhat like this:
Peanut breath > Squirrel stench > Jackpot… a furry light appetizer
This process isn’t too far from our standard method for search online… shit, Google makes billions catering to this natural tendency. Type in a single point of curiosity and bam! Sniff around all you want until you can find exactly what you’re looking for…
Now, being the intellectually superior beings that we are, humans have created a more sophisticated method of interaction… language. Instead of acting on an unknown, we question it. But it’s naïve to think that this complex system of interaction happened over night. Millions of years were needed to set the foundation for communication let alone, reason, rationality, and most importantly qualification.
And that’s the argument here. In order facilitate a legitimate interaction online in the form of Q&A, you needed a foundation. You needed to communicate and argue with reason and rationality, borne from an actual identity with some level of qualification. Applying this methodology of questioning to a world with out these structures left you with at best, an unreliable set of answer… and that’s what AskJeeves was.
Today, Quora has the foundation of communication and qualification (namely through their old employers, Facebook) to facilitate a higher level of interaction.
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