One of the challenging things about working on large scale services that lots of people use every day is that they get attached to their experience with the site and enjoy the familiarity. A consequence of this is that there is a large population of users for whom any change whether good or bad is met with resistance. 

One of the things that you end up learning when building a product is that if you’re afraid that a lot of people may complain about the changes you’ve made to the product they use every day then you’ll end up never making any changes.

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I was reading Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications... and came across the following statements

Now, consider the Four Horsemen of Hotness in 2010: Facebook, Quora, Foursquare, and Twitter. Think deeply about why none of these four could have been developed inside Google.
...
Quora is restaurant that serves huge quantities of bacn and toast. Quora is a dozen people running dozens of experiments in how to optimally use bacn to get people to return to Quora, and how to use toast to keep them there. Bacn is email you want but not right now, and Quora has 40 flavors of it that you can order. Quora's main use of Bacn is to sizzle with something delicious (a new answer to a question you follow, a new Facebook friend has been caught in the Quora lobster trap, etc.) to entice you to come back to Quora. Then, once you're there, the toast starts popping. Quora shifts the content to things you care about and hides things you don't care about in real-time, and subtly pops up notifications while you're playing, to entice you to keep sticking around and clicking around.

Although I’m a regular user of Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook and consider myself to be fairly up on what’s going on in the social media space, I’d never used Quora when I read the article. Given that I’ve seen hype about it in various corners I decided to create an account and give the service a try. Below are some of my impressions

What is Quora?

The easiest way to think about Quora is that Quora is to Yahoo! Answers as Facebook is to MySpace. It is a Q&A site where users utilize their real names often linked to Facebook profiles as opposed to pseudonyms. It avoids game mechanics such as high score leaderboards and user badges that services like Stackoverflow and Windows Live QnA instead relying on people getting kudos from their peers in the form of endorsements and votes on their answers to motivate users to answer questions.

Why is Quora is so Hot

Quora seems to have started off as an invitation-only service which allowed them to cherry pick the original users to meet a particular demographic (i.e. Silicon Valley geek) and also carefully manage the initial culture of the site. What they’ve created is a place where members of the Silicon Valley technorati and wannabes can post questions and expect them to be answered by members of the tech elite including insiders at various tech companies. Quora is the kind of place where questions like What are the scaling issues to keep in mind while developing a social network feed? is answered by one of the people who built the original Facebook news feed and a random opinion like Should Mark Zuckerberg step down as CEO of Facebook and find a more seasoned replacement? gets a response from Blake Ross. There aren’t many places online where a question like What were the 4 or 5 key decisions that Larry Page and Sergey Brin made in the early days of Google? can get a serious answer let alone a well researched history lesson as well as some actual insights.

This site is pure gold for technology bloggers, journalists and Web startup geeks. It is unsurprising that these sorts of people would consider Quora to be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Quora is a Community Site not a Communications Tool

One of the things I find weird about lumping Quora into the same grouping as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter is that unlike those sites it is not a communication tool. Facebook created a new communication channel between friends, acquaintances and family members that sits somewhere between brings together the functionality of email and IM along with the feed. Twitter created a lighter weight way to consume and create content for brands and people you find interesting as compared to blogging. Foursquare is about broadcasting your location to interested parties.

Quora on the other hand seems to have more in common with mail lists and discussion forums. Specifically, it is more like Metafilter, Digg and Reddit than it is like the aforementioned sites. This is a service that will live and die based on the culture of its community and is very dependent on "power users” who altruistically provide lots of value to the site in exchange for respect from their peers. The challenge for Quora is that it will be difficult to keep its current culture as it grows bigger. Will Facebook and Google insiders still be showing up in various question threads if the site grows to be as big as Yahoo! Answers with the same breadth of audience and volume of content? I can’t imagine that happening.

I also can’t imagine being able to segregate audiences like you can on communications services. Twitter has communities of mommy bloggers, tech bloggers, fans of various celebrities, sports fans, etc which operate independently of each other and really only are noticed by others every once in a while due to the trending topics feature. The same goes for Facebook and Foursquare. Quora will not be able isolate the various demographics from each other without changing the nature of the site. However they will have to figure that out once the current crop of users start logging in and seeing "how is babby formed" style questions because the site has taken off.

Then again, we might get lucky and the site never take off with the masses which may not be good for the VCs that have invested in it but would be for the community that has formed there.

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Many moons ago when we were planning the set of social features we would build into the next version of Windows Live, we were very mindful of the fact that our customers are inundated with lots of social networking sites and what people need are tools to manage their relationships across many services not yet another social networking site. As some of those features have now rolled out to the general public in the form of betas, I’ve been keeping an eye on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to see what regular people and techies think about what we’ve shipped.

What the Techies are Saying

Yesterday, Omar wrote a post on the Engineering Windows Live blog titled All Your Contacts in One Place where he talked about the work we’ve done in creating a single place where users can view and communicate with not only their Windows Live friends but also their contacts across multiple services including Facebook, MySpace and soon LinkedIn. Chris Messina posted the following in response to the story

I’ve talked about the work we’ve done around bringing customer value with the news feed that is integrated into the new Hotmail experience including how we’ve blended email into the news feed experience in recent posts. So I was pleased to see the following tweet from Jesse Stay

Thanks Jesse

Facebook Users on Windows Live

I regularly perform Facebook searches to see what people who are using the Windows Live Essentials beta think about the investments we’ve made in bringing social networking to the desktop in a big way. Here’s a sampling of some of the feedback I’ve found

You get the idea.

Twitter Users on Windows Live

I performed the same sorts of searches on Twitter and found similar feedback. Here are a few of my favorites

It’s really exciting to see so many people validating the design choices we made and enjoying the product that we’ve spent the last couple of months building. The outpouring of positive feedback has been really humbling and has me jazzed up to build even more things that make people happier as they connect with the people they care about using our products.

Thank you to everyone who has tried out the various betas.

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One of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these experiences closer together.

Over on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post Sharing 2.0

Our data is everywhere

People store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:

It would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from mobile phones and PCs that you may not own.

We're putting it all out there

It seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo & video dedicated sites, etc.)

Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere. They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news.

With regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on this topic by Dick Craddock titled Email in a World of Social Networking where he wrote

Recently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.

• You’re still very attached to your personal email accounts. We asked the survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting, IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.     
• Email is today’s tool of choice for managing and sharing documents, interacting with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center
• Email is your online photo album, too. People send and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still the most popular way to share photos.

One of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks. Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments on photos you posted to Facebook by going to http://www.facebook.com and other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ.

So what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you asked.  

Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social

One of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences where it is displayed.

On the web:

On the desktop:

Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social

The goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as

in the Messenger Social feed.

What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?

Since Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally, I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the Windows Live Messenger iPhone app from the Apple App Store(comment #33).

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One of my favorite things we built in Wave 4 of Windows Live is now available. You can now download Windows Live for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad from the US app store. You can also get it from the France, UK and Canadian app stores. The app kicks serious butt and I use it every day.

The official spiel is as follows

Windows Live Messenger for iPhone and iPod Touch is the best way to connect with the people that matter most and keep up with the things they are doing across the web. Use your iPhone to instant message your friends list, view and comment on your friends’ photos and status updates from Windows Live, Facebook, and MySpace, and at a glance, see what your Messenger friends are sharing from Flickr, YouTube, and many other social and photo sharing sites. Make sure to visit http://profile.live.com/Services today and setup Windows Live to bring in your social networks. Messenger is simply the best way to connect with your closest friends.

Chat:
Instant message with your Windows Live Messenger and Y! Messenger contacts on the go so you’re always connected to the people that matter most. You can even receive IM notifications when your app is closed so you never miss a message.

Social:
Windows Live Messenger gives you one place to view the updates your Messenger friends are sharing from social networks like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and more, helping you cut through the clutter on the go.

Photos:
Upload photos right from your phone to share your favorite moments with the people that matter most. Create albums, add captions, and let your friends and family comment on your photos.

Hotmail:
Access your Hotmail account without leaving the app to read, reply to, and compose emails. Get email notifications within the application so you know when you have new messages.

For me, push notifications when I get new IMs is the killer feature. I used to think IM was dead on smartphones until I used this app and realized that the problem was really lack of an IM client with push notifications. If you use Windows Live Messenger, you need to cop this app today. If you need further convincing here are some pretty pictures

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