Another Quora snapshot – we’ll probably next see a pattern similar to what Google and Oracle have done in this context – i.e., Facebook will likely start acquiring its successful progeny, at least the ones it fails to competitively crush…
Here's the Quora story, in short: It's been a favorite of the Silicon Valley set since long before its public launch last June, due in large part to the fact that it's become a hub of discussion for industry elite--much like the early days of Twitter. The Quora Web site lists only 14 employees, with four of them (including Cheever and D'Angelo) listing Facebook as a past employer. Two others are ex-Googlers, and a third worked at Twitter. The company is backed by Benchmark Capital, where another ex-Facebooker, Matt Cohler, occupies the venture firm's seat on the Quora board of directors.
Yet Quora is very much the underdog; when it was still in private beta, Facebook launched its Q&A product, Facebook Questions, leading some to wonder whether it was trying to snuff out its ex-employees' start-up. Both companies offer a more groomed alternative to Q&A sites that are better known for strings of incoherent answers than clusters of good ones, and both focus on making existing questions easy to find and on emphasizing the "real" identity of the people asking and answering, resulting in their frequent classification as "social search" rather than just Q&A.
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