One of the most talked about websites to come out of beta in 2010 in Silicon Valley has been question and answer site Quora. Quora does a number of things correctly aimed at getting its users to both ask and answer questions, however, the still very new service still has some features and issues that we would like to see addressed to make it even better.
Faster interface
Quite often, we notice that the site hangs up on requests, and we’d like to see that addressed. This isn’t a major flaw, and one that can certainly be addressed with more resources, but Quora is noticeably slower than we’d like to see it. Perhaps it is fast enough for most – maybe we should ask a question about it…
Date stamps on questions
While there are date stamps on answers, it is a little frustrating to not see a date stamp on questions. We understand that Quora wants the question to stand the test of time or something (like Wikipedia in a way) but knowing how fresh the question is would probably entice more people to answer them.
RSS feeds
Especially as Quora already has a (rather detailed) email notification system set up for following people, topics and questions, it’s a bit surprising that the service hasn’t added the ability to follow an RSS feed of any of those activity streams. Of course, an even better way to do that would be with an…
API
Quora will really be an extremely interesting platform to build on when and if the service releases one or more APIs. To get extremely meta on this request, you can check out the Quora question “Is Quora planning an API?” that has an answer by co-founder Charlie Cheever. We know that our own Boris would probably love a Quora API. With the absence of developer APIs, however, the final request is even more pressing…
Mobile apps
Quora does have a mobile version of its website (which isn’t half bad frankly), but still, if the service isn’t going to offer third-party developers the opportunity to build stand-alone mobile apps or integrate the Q&A stream into existing services/apps, then we’d really like to see Quora itself come out with apps on the major mobile platforms. However, as Quora really does seem focused on enhancing its website for the foreseeable future (not to surprising really, considering the founders came from Facebook), we might have to wait quite some time before this happens, if at all.
So those are our top 5 requests, how about you? Please let us/Quora know in the comments!
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