Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” In our very early testing it’s a pleasure to use, but we’re going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.
Is this the next Facebook?
Probably not – but it does look pretty fabulous. The service is still in closed beta (we’ve been trying to get in for months) but here’s some screenshots that show some key features.
Update: We’ve got a limited number of invites to offer. See this post for details.
Quora is a little like Aardvark, the social Q&A service founded by ex-Googlers and rumored to be in Google’s acquisition sights, and it’s a little like Stack Overflow, the carefully crafted Q&A site for programmers that’s shot through the roof with reader interest. It’s definitely different though.
Co-founder Charlie Cheever says it’s built on Tornado, the real-time infrastructure built by FriendFeed, then bought and open sourced by Facebook. That’s a nice touch.
Here’s what we’ve seen so far. Click these screenshots to get a bigger view of each of them. There are more coming up. We’ll do our best to offer invites tomorrow morning.
