#ask questions and get answers

#Quora: Ask Questions, Get Answers

Nathaniel Mott on January 10th 2012

Everyone has questions. Whether it’s about a favorite television show, the best pizza in New York City or something that they’re itching to ask the founder of their favorite company, we all have an urge to inquire about our worlds. In each case, where there’s a question there’s (probably) an answer locked away in someone else’s brain. As much as we love asking questions, we might love answering them even more.

Quora brings the questioners and the answerers together in one place, allowing them to exchange ideas and combine excellent questions with well thought out answers. So, question: is Quora worth a download?

Getting Started with Quora

A Quora account is easy enough to come by, allowing you to sign up with Twitter or via email. There’s no charge associated with the service and the application is free, so you can get started asking and answering today.

Quora is based on two simple concepts: you have good questions and someone has a good answer, or vice versa. Questions are arranged via Topics, which are essentially proper nouns within the service. Once you find a topic that you’re interested in you can begin using the service.

Asking and Searching for Questions

Let’s say that the first thing I want to do is ask a question. This can be accomplished from the Search Add section along the bottom navigation bar, where Quora displays a unified search/add field along the top of the screen.

Searching for a question or adding a new one.

Having these two seemingly different functions covered with the same objects makes sense on Quora’s part. By combining the two actions Quora has done its best to insure that there won’t be duplicate questions, preventing Who is Catwoman in the Dark Knight Rises trailer? from being asked thirteen different times.

Let’s say that you are asking a unique question. On top of all the search results you can find what you’re currently typing highlighted in blue. By tapping this area you are taken directly to the Add a Question screen, which allows you to add details about your question, attach a photo to your question or control who sees the question.

Nearby Questions and Answers

One interesting feature of the Quora iPhone app is the ability to view questions and answers in your area. While this isn’t all that useful if you’re in a relatively rural area, this can quickly help you find out about a city that you find yourself in.

Seems like most of my state is pretty desolate.

By allowing you to view nearby activity, Quora is almost adding a virtual reality layer to the application. See a pizza place? Someone may have already asked about the best pizza in the city that you’re in, and the place you’re standing in front of happens to have the best pizza around. Find yourself staring at the Statue of Liberty? Chances are you can find out some of the history of the monument through Quora.

The Nearby view will either be a fun tool to use or completely useless, depending on where you find yourself. As Quora isn’t as widespread as Twitter or Facebook it’s unlikely that everywhere you visit will have an active batch of questions, so be prepared to see an empty list as you travel.

Interacting with Answers

So you’ve come across a question with a few different answers. How should these be ordered? By date? No, that wouldn’t make any sense; what if the most recent answer pales in comparison to the first answer offered? Quora has thought about this and come up with a simple system to help you determine which answers should be displayed the fastest.

Use the arrows on the right to vote an answer up or down.

When you view an answer you’ll find two arrows along the top right side of the screen. What do these do? They vote an answer up or down so that the order of answers influenced by the people that are actually using the app.

Different options for sharing the answer you re interacting with.

Of course, you might want to interact with an answer besides just voting it up or down based on its merit. Maybe you want to share the answer that you’ve found with other people. Here, again, Quora has you covered; along the bottom of the Answer screen is a large Share button, allowing you to share the answer via Twitter, Facebook, email or plain-old copying the link to the answer.

Getting Social

Despite its emphasis on questions and answers, Quora also has a strong social component. If you’re interested in following another person — whether it’s because they ask good questions, provide good answers, or have similar tastes to yourself — you can do so from directly within the app, populating your feed of questions with their activity.

Your feed is where you view what your friends have viewed, asked or answered

I’ve found that following other users quickly exposes me to questions that I wouldn’t have thought to ask on my own but are certainly interesting. Combined with the Shuffle feature at the top of the Feed it’s next to impossible not to find an interesting question or answer to kill some time with.

I can see the board, but I can t make the board.

Quora recently unveiled a new feature that makes the service even more social called Boards. Boards are essentially a collection of things that you find on Quora or around the Web based around a common topic or interest. Users can follow the boards that you create and vice versa; I haven’t found a way to create a Board through the iPhone app, but it is possible to follow other user’s Boards.

Conclusion

Quora’s iPhone app is a relatively simple application that can be used both as a serious tool and as a fun distraction. I find myself launching Quora most often when I’m reading something and need a quick answer to a question, or when I’m bored and want to explore the depth of the service.

Right now Quora’s app feels like it’s a bit behind the service, as I can’t find a way to interact with Boards through the app. In some ways that s a good thing, as Quora’s fun and usefulness is found in its simplicity: you ask or answer a question, follow questions, topics, or people, and you gain some knowledge.

The answer to the opening question: if you have a curious mind or would like to crowd-source your questions instead of running a Google search every time you have an inquiry, Quora is a great way to kill time and get answers — and that is definitely worth a download.