Quora seems to get talked about a lot, and seems to have many influential people as members.<p>What is it doing right? How did it get all those influential people to sign up to such a new website?<p>Bonus question: How are they planning on making money?
They are providing something that people want: answers (not written in text speak) to interesting questions. As to why they appear to be getting so much traction to a problem already solved by several sites (Reddit, MetaFilter, StackExchange, Googling), I'm not entirely certain. I suspect the answers market is just <i>that large</i>, and though I haven't followed them much, there must be some key (or controversial) people involved helping them. Never underestimate the buzz that human drama creates.
From the inside Quora doesn't look to be very big. Maybe its because I don't have a network within Quora, but browsing topics is kind of difficult. There doesn't seem to be much involvement outside of topics regarding Startups, Business, Technology, etc.
Quora itself has a bunch to say on this:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Quora-a-valuable-service" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Quora-a-valuable-service</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-Users-Love-Quora" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-Users-Love-Quora</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/How-did-Quora-manage-to-do-what-Mahalo-and-Yahoo-Answers-couldnt-which-is-getting-such-high-quality-questions-and-answers-on-their-site" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/How-did-Quora-manage-to-do-what-Mahalo-...</a><p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-quality-of-discussion-on-Quora-so-high" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-quality-of-discussion-on-Quo...</a>