Drupt

How To Reply To Vivek Wadhwa`s Review Of Quora?

January 24, 2011

On the weekend, Vivek Wadhwa wrote a review of Quora on TechCrunch to which this post replies.

Mr. Wadhwa is an idiot (there’s no other word, sadly) for saying this.

But when there are hundreds of answers to a given question, by people you have never heard of (often with fictitious names), how will you separate the wheat from the chaff?

What does it matter if you’ve never heard of someone to decide whether their opinion is valid or informative? You can use reason and fact checking to separate wheat from the chaff. Quora is not meant to be infallible, but at the very least it can provide leads, ideas, differing points of view etc.

Similarly, when you consider his above remarks (about people he’s never heard of) in combination with this remark

The people whose opinion I value, such as Quora’s #1respondent, Robert Scoble, will simply stop posting on the site when they get drowned out by the noise from the masses.

it reveals that he’s only really interested in communicating with his closed-circle of friends (he speaks with Scoble on the phone sometimes, and he’s already implied that he doesn’t value the opinion of people he’s never heard of), so it’s no surprise that he would not enjoy entering a more public marketplace of ideas where he doesn’t occupy a privileged position (as a university professor he’s part of the marketplace but on a pedestal, just as he is when he’s on TechCrunch high above the rabble he looks down up in the comments).

This guy’s a gigantic bore!

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What Would Facebook Look Like Today If The Winkelvoss Twins Controlled It?

January 10, 2011

Of course this can never be known, but it is possible to consider what the Winkelvoss’ Twins think Facebook would look like if they controlled it today? You could get an idea of that by considering some remarks they made about Zuckerberg’s contribution to Facebook in a recent NY Times article here.

The article says the Winkelvosses’s think

that Mr. Zuckerberg deserved some credit for “not screwing up” and expanding Facebook into a community of 500 million users. But they believe the fame and fortune is undeserved.

In my opinion, by saying that

a) Zuckerberg didn’t “screw up,” the Winkelvosses think Facebook was basically on autopilot to become huge

b) ‘fame and fortune is undeserved,” the Winkelvosses think that Zuckerberg doesn’t deserve any credit for innovations or decisions (including hiring decisions) that were made in the development of Facebook into the giant that it is today

c) he deserves some credit for expanding Facebook into a community of 500 million users, they think his contribution is really about growing the company, but, in the context of other other remarks above, there was no real innovation.

In summary, they think the core of what Facebook is today existed in their brains. Zuckerberg just made it bigger and didn’t screw up.

Just to be absolutely clear, I highly doubt that it would look the same today if it had been controlled by them. They aren’t developers and wouldn’t have made the kind of smart decisions that only developers would make with regards to the development of the site.

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Quora Review: It Is Going To Be Huge, But You’ll Need An Extra Email Account!

January 9, 2011

Start off with the bad: the more you use Quora, the more email notifications you get, so if you get an extra email account and link it to Quora, you can have the notifications sent to a dummy account. There’s also the occasional SPAM.

Now for the good: if you give Quora a chance, you’ll feel smarter after using it. Even if you don’t get the information to a question you asked (often you do), and you can tolerate reading and ignoring some dumb questions, you’ll realize that just by reading other people’s questions–smart people’s questions–in topics of interest to you that you learn by reading the question. There’s millions of cliches about the question being more important than the answer and it is true with Quora in many respects. It is not just a Q & A forum, it is a forum where, at its best, thinking takes place in the form of Question and Answering. For example, you can learn what people in other parts of the world or other industries are thinking eons before that type of information normally gets put on the net. This is knowledge in real time.

Make no mistake, the founders behind Quora–Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever–are young and have, as their track records show (read the bios in the links) exceptionally gifted minds, and they would have to in order to build a system–or an ecosystem–that would attract other smart and resourceful users (as well as a fair share of the uneducated, which also existed in Plato’s Republic).

In an TechCrunch interview, the co-founders made some interesting statements that suggest Quora could be revolutionary.

First, they claim that 90% of the information in people’s heads is not on the net, and Quora is one way of getting it out. After trying Quora for a few days, I believe this to be true.

Second, they describe Quora as a kind of reverse blogging. “When you write a blog post, you write to your audience…When you come to a question page on Quora and it’s blank there are a bunch of people waiting for the answer. An expert will look at it and say ‘there’s an audience here and I know exactly what they want to hear.’” As Twitter became huge by turning email on its head, Quora could do the same with blogging.

Probably the scariest/most impressive thing about Quora is that even after using it for only a few days one begins to see that it has the potential to grow into something much greater than a simple Q & A site would suggest, and remembering how smart the founders are they probably have an vision in their head for the site/community that will not be immediately to a user presented with the idea of a Questions and Answer site. Quora is much closer to the concept of Agora, or the Greek marketplace of ideas in which debate was an essential part of ancient Greek society.

If Quora founders can build a community that brings out the best in people and gets the best information out of their heads, they will have a massive success on their hands that could pose a serious threat (in the form of getting users to spend more time in Quora than elsewhere and bring advertising revenues with them to any other major internet service including Google, Twitter and Facebook.

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If 1 Out of 4 Web Visits Is To Facebook, Are They Really Only Worth 1/4 Of Google

January 4, 2011

Back in November 2010, it was announced by Hitwise that Facebook accounts for 1 out of every 4 web visits in the United States. that Facebook accounts for 1 out of every 4 web visits in the United States (and does anyone think this is slowing down?).

Now the most recent valuation of Facebook puts it at $50 billion, or approximately 1/4 of the market capitalization of Google, and 1/6 the market capitalization of Apple.

If Facebook controls that much of the internet, don’t you think they’re undervalued?

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Spammers Who Love Jeopardy Will Love Quora

January 3, 2011

Q & A forum Quora recevies a lot positive press from TechCrunh especially, as a place to get not only answers to the questions you need, but also as a source of inspiration for tech related news stories– “nugget of information,” as one TechCrunch writer calls it. After all, Quora’s user base consists of many founders and CEOs and key creative people in the tech world who freely provide valuable information about companies they’ve been associated with.

There are also all sorts of ambitious young software engineers completing their (unofficial) MBA component of their tech education using Quora, picking up and putting into their pockets the nuggets of information that may help them decide which venture capital firms to approach or other business related issues.

However useful and fun Quora is, Plato’s Republic it is not. Spamming exists in Quora. It’s an especially useful/fun place to spam if you used to watch the game show Jeopardy, in which contestants had to turn their answers into questions. If you want to spam in Quora, you just have to turn the information you want to disseminate into a question, or make it the answer of a question, and that’s it.

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InstaHeadaches: An Instagram Signs Off Because Of “Chronic Headaches”

January 2, 2011

The above image is a screen shot of a message sent from an Instagram user named Avamehari to her followers, in which she complains about “chronic” headaches she is getting from her “InstaAddiction” to the Instagram iPhone app.

The language is funny, but it’s a serious concern for her as she announces that she is taking a forced break from the service. “Kind of funny, kind of bad,” she says.

It is funny, but it raises serious issues not only about the addictive nature of devices like the iPhone (and the “crackberry” — a popular name for the iPhone competitor Blackberry from RIM) and the apps that run on the phone, but also about the real health consequences of those addictions.

Do you think there should be more regulation in this area, with warnings of the kind that you see on cigarette packs?

Or what, if anything, should be done to protect the consumer from the negative physical, mental, emotional and spiritual effects of overuse of these devices?

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Instagram’s 3 Year Business Plan: Compete Facebook

December 30, 2010

It’s the story of David & Goliath set in Silicon Valley.

The remarkable document, a business plan for the new and wildly popular iPhone app Instagram, and filtered using one of Instagram’s photo filters, suggests that the company plans to rival Facebook within 3 years.

The document quotes approvingly Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, “Social is not a layer you can add,” but it also adds that layers can be added to an inherently social service like Instagram. On this point, the note emphasizes that Instagram’s name, unlike PicPlz’s, is conveniently not limited to pics, and it says full profiles, text, video and messaging services will be added.

User growth, up to 1 million after 3 months, is projected to hit 30 million in 1 year. With the Android release forthcoming, and general awareness of the free app increasing, the number is certainly ambitious but not impossible.

If the document is authentic, it reveals Instagram’s approach to build a full-scale web experience starting from a single product, and shows the numerous strategic changes the company has made during the short period of their surprising success.

What do you think?

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Can Edward Jones’ 5 Critical Activities For Financial Advisors Help The Internet Entrepreneur?

December 28, 2010

After listening recently again to Lars Rasmussen’s inspiration for Google Wave, I remember his remark that most successful internet inventions mirror a real-life service, such as with email and snail-mail. An obvious corollary to his idea is that business principals of successful brick-and-mortar entrepreneurs can apply to internet start ups. But what are the best principals to follow?

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Twitter Hourly Limits–Why Twitter Users Need Google Acquisition

December 26, 2010

Self-explanatory. Twitter hourly limits would not exist if Google owned Twitter. Could you image something like this on Google’s Search or YouTube?

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Instagram Hits The GoDaddy HomeRun–Will Beat PicPlz On Branding Alone

December 25, 2010

There are currently two very popular photo-sharing apps for the iPhone, but the future clearly belongs to Instagram, and it’s going to come down to branding alone.

Culturally, Instagram is a hit, whereas PicPlz, while functionally a very strong app, hasn’t captured the ZeitGeist in nearly the same way. In three short months, Instagram has assembled an army of 1 million passionate and and vocal ( high profile taste-making) users. But the secret to Instagram’s success may be the simple fact that it hit a home run with its name, which incidentally satisfies all the GoDaddy requirements for a successful name.

Unlike PicPlz, which (following the KISS principal) tells you in its names that the app is about “pics,” Instagram took a significant risk by leaving that informaitve part out of its name (and conveying the “this is a photo app” information only through the image of the camera in its logo). Instead, with its name, Instagram created something more “memorable” and “fun,” which are two elements Dr. Bob Parsons of GoDaddy fame mentioned as key to a successful domain name (and, to be sure, GoDaddy’s massive success as a company is founded primarily on the basis of its fun and memorable name).

Predictably, PicPlz helps you share “pics” but Instagram delivers something new, a “gram.” Like a candygram, Instagram conveys surprise, fun and happiness all in one, and, as its name says, it does it instantly. The app is superfast, and that’s not a gimme. The leading photo-sharing app should be Photoshop Express (based on Photoshop’s other strengths), but it is painfully slow. For anyone who’s never had time to keep a photo blog, Instagram (and PicPlz, which is also fast) might be just the answer. Take pics with your iPhone, and publish them instantly with one click on your Tumblr blog. (In a testament to the power of the Instagram brand, the app has already inspired one such blog–www.InstaGirls.com–which features “grams” of girls snapped on the city street )

PicPlz is a great app. The people behind it (Dalton Caldwell and Brian Berg) have visions of turning it into a larger company, and they won the confidence of Andreesson Horowitz, who, as discussed in a well publicized TechCrunch post, have invested in both apps, but eventually made a long-term decision (one they will regret) to go with PIcPlz.

Instagram is a great app, but it has become more than an app, which will be the critical factor in determining its long term value assuming the team behind it doesn’t slack off on its technical development. Perhaps the best way to measure Instagram’s success is that no one understands it. Only yesterday, occasional TechCrunch guest-writer Jon Evans said, “I think Instagram is dumb, but maybe I’m wrong.” This is the kind of remark that is made once a technology becomes bigger than it should be based on its technology alone. But Instagram is no longer just a photosharing app, it is a cultural event, which is why Evans thinks it’s dumb. He’s not complaining about the technology. Rather, he doesn’t get–in the sense of “share”–the popular enthusiasm for the app, which only happens when something becomes huge. Nobody would say PicPlz is “dumb” because no one cares about it the same way. And that is the reason the future belongs to Instagram.

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