If you've haven't heard much about Quora, odds are you're not spending a whole lot of quality time with Silicon Valley types.
The site, which launched in private beta back in January, has been the subject of quite a bit of buzz over the past several months, particularly since June, when it first opened to the public.
On paper, Quora is nothing new. It's based on the same basic premise as sites like Yahoo Answers—crowd-sourced solutions to user questions. What ultimately sets Quora apart, its users will insist, is the quality of the solutions the site provides. While sites like Yahoo Answers often highlight some of the negative possibilities of crowd-based responses, Quora is frequented by some of the smartest folks in tech.
Quora is about to see the landscape get a little more crowded, as one of the world's biggest Web sites readies its entry into the field. Facebook is getting set to launch a beta version of its Questions site, putting crowd sourcing to the test amongst its 500 million members.
While Quora went public earlier this summer, it still retains the feeling of a relatively closed community—something a Facebook Questions, for better or worse, will likely never achieve. Still, while its users no doubt appreciate their still tightly knit community, a Web site is a business. Quora, like Facebook and everyone else, has to make money.
Today the site will take another step into the larger Internet world by opening itself up to search. Quora co-founder Adam D'Angelo recently responded to the question, "Will Quora open up to Google or other search engines?" writing,
Yes, this will happen on August 6th. We are opening up because we are trying to make high-quality knowledge available to as many people as possible. We are committed to giving answerers control over their answers, and so you will have the ability to edit or remove your answers if you're concerned about what shows up next to your name.
As a result, you will no doubt be hearing a lot more about Quora in the weeks and months to come. Whether or not the opening of the site results in a dumbing down of sorts, however, depends on the administrators and contributors, naturally.