{"id":2332,"date":"2011-01-17T12:48:51","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T19:48:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talesfromthe.net\/jon\/?p=2332"},"modified":"2011-01-17T12:48:51","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T19:48:51","slug":"life-imitates-art-imitates-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/2011\/01\/17\/life-imitates-art-imitates-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Life imitates art imitates life?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines” … here’s an excerpt I\u00c2\u00a0was just editing last night from g0ddesses.net, my comic novel-in-progress. The scene’s set on a discussion forum that’s modeled after Hacker News<\/a>:<\/p>\n

startup founder<\/em>: ladzzz.com is like Quora meets Foursquare with questions guys want to know about.\u00c2\u00a0 and game mechanics.
\ntech blogger<\/em>: i know an unnamed startup doing Quora meets GameCrush with game mechanics like Zynga
\nangel investor<\/em>: you’re thinking small.\u00c2\u00a0 why not Quora plus Badgeville’s game mechanics for the enterprise?
\n<\/em><\/div>\n

\"twoToday, I saw a link on HackerNews to a Read Write Web<\/em> story Quora for the Enterprise:\u00c2\u00a0Two Contenders:<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky* suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.<\/p>\n

But what about Quora for the enterprise?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed!\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 And reading further in the story, discovered that one of the contenders is “is applying gamification<\/a> principles in an attempt to drive adoption”.<\/p>\n

Nice to know I’m in sync with the Zeitgeist.<\/p>\n

Life imitates art.<\/p>\n

But art imitates life, too. \u00c2\u00a0Back at Microsoft in 2006, one of the game-changing strategies<\/a> we came up with on the Ad Astra project was to leverage the web Q&A\u00c2\u00a0platform along with other consumer products like MSN Messenger in the enterprise by combining them with Sharepoint’s strenghts — and another strategy was “game-centric user interfaces”. \u00c2\u00a0It remains a great idea, and let’s hope one somebody succeeds with it: one of startups in the article,** an established company like Jive or SocialText, or a new venture.<\/p>\n

\"ad-astra\"<\/a>And while we’re on the subject of great Ad Astra ideas I\u00c2\u00a0hope somebody will succeed with, how about taking a diversity focus with Q&A? \u00c2\u00a0The upside of Q&A\u00c2\u00a0is huge; Naver’s success<\/a> in South Korea highlights how well it complements algorithmic search.\u00c2\u00a0 With Google starting to be overwhelmed by content farms and spam, there’s a lot of money to be made. \u00c2\u00a0So unsurprisingly, it’s a very cluttered space. And the engineering isn’t rocket science, so how can a company get a sustained competitive advantage?<\/p>\n

Quora’s approach has been to concentrate on the Silicon Valley technology community, well-known early adopters who are very influential. \u00c2\u00a0And it’s worked out great for them: an active early community, huge amounts of media attention, funding on ridiculously good terms, and usage now starting to skyrocket.\u00c2\u00a0 So far so good.\u00c2\u00a0 Now what?<\/p>\n

Back in November, Kara Swisher framed Quora’s challenge<\/a> as “trying to move the site well beyond its Silicon Valley-tech-dudes forum to one in which a plethora of topics and memes thrive.”\u00c2\u00a0 They certainly have a good opportunity.\u00c2\u00a0 So I\u00c2\u00a0asked what they’re doing to create a more diverse user base<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 At some point, I sent it to Charlie Cheever from Quora.\u00c2\u00a0 Three months later, nobody’s responded.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00c2\u00a0guess I\u00c2\u00a0got an answer.<\/p>\n

A different approach (the one we proposed for Microsoft, before they cancelled the Q&A\u00c2\u00a0project and killed the MSN\u00c2\u00a0Messenger brand) would be to start with diversity.\u00c2\u00a0 Get a first foothold with women, Latinos, seniors, bilinguals, and other “niche” markets that almost nobody’s targeting.\u00c2\u00a0 There are a lot more of them out there than techie white guys — and their needs aren’t being met well by today’s search engines, so there’s a lot more upside.<\/p>\n

Oh well.\u00c2\u00a0 If Quora won’t do it, maybe somebody else will.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 In my novel, g0ddesses.net introduces a Q&A system designed by a woman and implemented by a diverse, mostly-female team.\u00c2\u00a0 With any luck at all, life will imitate art.<\/p>\n

jon<\/p>\n

PS: for more on Quora, see Michael Arrington’s Quora has the Magic<\/a> and Semil Shah’s Frequently Asked Questions About Quora<\/a>, both on TechCrunch<\/em>; Beth Kanter’s Is Quora Yet Another Social Network or Something Different?<\/a>; Cara Pring’s Quora – Why you need to get involved<\/a>, on The Social Skinny<\/em>; and the answers to Why are people so impressed\/confident in Quora?<\/a><\/p>\n

For thoughts about how a diversity-focused Q&A sight might be different, see CV Harquail\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s If Women Had Designed Facebook<\/a> and Designing for Feminists vs. Designing for Women: Different vs. Revolutionary<\/a> as well as my Emoware: What does Emotional Software Look Like<\/a>?\u00c2\u00a0 And for g0ddesses.net … stay tuned!<\/p>\n

Update, January 21<\/strong>: CV and I were discussing this on Twitter, and she suggested I ask the quorum.\u00c2\u00a0 Good idea!\u00c2\u00a0 How would Quora be different if it prioritized diversity?<\/a> Hmm, y’know, now that I think of it, that’d be a pretty good scene to add in g0ddesses.net …<\/p>\n

*\u00c2\u00a0who, in the small world department, i linked to in\u00c2\u00a0 Collusion is So Hot Right Now<\/a> and once left a comment on Unfortuante Handling of an Error Condition<\/a> \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

**\u00c2\u00a0or a competitor like StackOverflow<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Aren’t they a contender?\u00c2\u00a0 Update, January 27: Hah, I was right.\u00c2\u00a0 See Adrian Jeffries’ Forget Quora, Stack Overflow is Killing It<\/a> in the New York Observer<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 For competitive positioning between Quora and Stack Overflow, see Stack Overflow founder Joel Spolsky’s view on Hacker News<\/em><\/a> and VC Fred Wilson’s comments in Prisms, Kool-Aid, and an Opportunity<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Joel knows how to sell to enterprises from his experience at Fog City Software and already has a huge customer list, so it’s a natural possibility for Stack Overflow.
\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Image credit: By Valerie Everett via Flickr<\/a>, licensed under Creative Commons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How about taking a diversity focus with Q&A? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,13,16],"tags":[158,177,289,338],"class_list":["post-2332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-g0ddesses-net","category-professional","category-social-computing","category-tales-from-the-net","tag-g0ddesses-net","tag-hn","tag-quora","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}