Question
Is interest in Quora waning? If so, what might be some of the reasons?
Answer
Interest is not waning. This is just a classic hype cycle effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyp...
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/1...
Since this is a Web product, the hype cycle is exaggerated by the team catching up on technical debt in the backend (like the recent migration to PyPy, efforts on speeding stuff up) and finishing the job for major features already in the pipeline and in beta (the credits system, the new iPhone app with its location-friendly features...). This trajectory will be familiar if you've ever seen the inside of a product development operation.
I suspect, within a few months, much of the action will shift to an API-driven ecosystem. Which means you should be keeping an eye on Stormy Shippy and others who are staking claims there.
Socially, the next-shiny-new-thing crowd has moved on (apparently to such strange new attractions as Shaker, the winner of TC Disrupt). That's a good thing. As many people have said (Clay Shirky and Seth Godin among them I think), a technology starts being socially interesting when it stops being technologically interesting.
This also means that the core heavy users are going to start taking Quora even more seriously and start planning around its existence. It took me a year or more of playing around with Twitter before I began to seriously integrate it into my blogging. Quora is just getting there. So far, I've just been playing. Now I might start handling my presence here a lot more deliberately. Starting perhaps with putting the Quora icon alongside Twitter, Facebook etc. on my blog sidebar.
If you missed the early adopter window, this might be the best time to start investing in Quora (as a contributor that is). The platform has been proven in multiple verticals by now (tech, hollywood, politics). In terms of Geoffrey Moore's "crossing the chasm" model, we are about to enter what is known as the bowling alley phase (Moore's chasm is in many ways the same thing as the valley in the hype cycle or Seth Godin's "dip"). In the bowling alley, many vertical domains rapidly start to topple.
Start staking out unmapped topic areas and building a reputation there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyp...
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/1...
Since this is a Web product, the hype cycle is exaggerated by the team catching up on technical debt in the backend (like the recent migration to PyPy, efforts on speeding stuff up) and finishing the job for major features already in the pipeline and in beta (the credits system, the new iPhone app with its location-friendly features...). This trajectory will be familiar if you've ever seen the inside of a product development operation.
I suspect, within a few months, much of the action will shift to an API-driven ecosystem. Which means you should be keeping an eye on Stormy Shippy and others who are staking claims there.
Socially, the next-shiny-new-thing crowd has moved on (apparently to such strange new attractions as Shaker, the winner of TC Disrupt). That's a good thing. As many people have said (Clay Shirky and Seth Godin among them I think), a technology starts being socially interesting when it stops being technologically interesting.
This also means that the core heavy users are going to start taking Quora even more seriously and start planning around its existence. It took me a year or more of playing around with Twitter before I began to seriously integrate it into my blogging. Quora is just getting there. So far, I've just been playing. Now I might start handling my presence here a lot more deliberately. Starting perhaps with putting the Quora icon alongside Twitter, Facebook etc. on my blog sidebar.
If you missed the early adopter window, this might be the best time to start investing in Quora (as a contributor that is). The platform has been proven in multiple verticals by now (tech, hollywood, politics). In terms of Geoffrey Moore's "crossing the chasm" model, we are about to enter what is known as the bowling alley phase (Moore's chasm is in many ways the same thing as the valley in the hype cycle or Seth Godin's "dip"). In the bowling alley, many vertical domains rapidly start to topple.
Start staking out unmapped topic areas and building a reputation there.