The social Q&A site Quora, founded by early Facebook engineers, today launched its app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, bringing its community of queries and answers both trivial and profound into the mobile world. most of the features of the site are neatly squeezed on the smaller screen: search, a home feed of Q&A chosen to interest you, notifications on people, questions and topics you follow and the ability to add a question or write a post.
The first thing you notice about the app is that it pretty much replicates the experience of the Web site. That’s a tough achievement in and of itself. the second thing you notice is how freaking fast the app is. Response times are faster than almost any other app I’ve used. its designers (who have been posting about the project on Quora in recent months) went for speed by stripping out the Web site’s live updating and built it to pre-fetch content it thinks you’ll like.
What’s new to the app is the Nearby screen (above), which pinpoints your location on a map and uses it to suggest topics in the area. you can move the map around with your finger and the topics change as the map re-centers. the suggestions are based on geotagging that Quora users have been doing back on its Web site. this is a work-in-progress. I live in Brooklyn Heights and the Quora app suggested I check out the Hunts Point topic, calling it a “Brooklyn neighborhood.” Hunts Point, a place with very different charms than Brooklyn Heights, is 14 miles away in Queens. someone is either mistagging new York City locations back at Quora or the algorithm needs a tweak.
The Nearby feature holds great promise as a way to surface answers to questions such as “What are good tips for hailing a taxi in new York City?” or “ How do I find a lawyer to fight a speeding ticket in Miami Beach?” Quora has a large and growing catalog of Q&A on the topic of cultural faux pas in various locations: Toronto, Montreal, Hogwarts, China. With its speed and access to insight and advice on the go, Quora’s app could become a better choice than a search engine. “you get a rich variety of perspective. It’s like talking to 15 smart people,” says Quora’s quasi-CFO Marc Bodnick (who was formerly at Elevation Partners, which is a minority investor in Forbes Media).
The app is free and has no advertising, much like Quora’s Web site. there is no revenue looming for this company, which raised $11 million earlier in the year and is mum on traffic, growth, number of users, pretty much everything (other than that new York City now has the most Quora users, ahead of the Bay Area).
So why the app? Quora already has a decent mobile site, but an app “was one of the top requested things from our users. We get a lot of traffic from mobile anyway,” says cofounder Charlie Cheever. Also, he said, “people kill a lot of time on the phone between things. Quora is really good for that.”