In other words, Quora is a knowledge database built by the community, for the community regarding any subject. Unlike Wikipedia, that takes its model from a traditional encyclopedia, Quora’s users can ask whatever they want and get answers from like-minded individuals–from business strategy to if people work naked when they work from home–all is accepted as a question and there are always people to share their point of view according to their own experience.

It is here where Quora really excels. Make a question about “Y Combinator” and you will probably get an answer from one its venture partners; make a question about Google or Android and you will get an insight from people that work or used to work there. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t stop or stays focused on Silicon Valley and technology or social media subjects: cooking, best day trips, sociology, psychology, art, you name it; Quora is a growing database of knowledge made by its vibrant community.

How Quora Works

Topics

When you first join Quora you can chose topics that you are interested in. If you were invited the person that invited you also has the chance to recommend to you some topics they know you would be interested in. That will get you started in what comes to topics.

Network

Quora uses Facebook and Twitter so you can start following your friends within Quora. You will see that the more questions and topics you start following you will be inclined to follow people that are involved in the same topics and whose answers you appreciate.

Ask, Answer, Comment, Thank, Vote

To ask a question all you have to do is type it in. After that you will be able to “host” that question in a topic (or several if that is the case). Your question will then be available to everyone following those topics thus generate answers.

There are no constraints to how many questions you can answer (even if you are not following those topics and you just came across it via someone on your timeline or by search) but you can only answer once. You are able to edit your answer at any time and comment on others’ answers where and when you feel appropriate.

A important part, in my opinion, of the whole system is that you are able to vote or thank for any answer given to a question which allows others know that you found that answer helpful.

You are also able to vote an answer as not relevant/helpful to the question and the question will be hidden from the timeline but you are still able to see it’s content if you choose.

Quora Pros and Cons

Pros

1. Ease of use: The interface design is clean and intuitive and allows you to easily navigate the site. The timeline shows you new questions from the topics you are following and the activity of the people you are following as well. Anytime there is activity on a question you are following (a new answer, comment or vote) you get a notification.

2. An interesting community: It is much better to know the secrets for cooking the perfect Peking duck from someone that cooks and lives in Peking (Beijing) than from a cookbook written by a French person. Quora has managed to bring to its network lots of high-profile people that are answering questions that relate to their companies or former companies (the case of Johnathan Abrams, ex-Friendster, comes immediately to my mind).

3. A free advice network from like minded individuals: Unlike Twitter, Quora’s noise ratio is very small. The fact that, if you want, you can only follow one or two topics without even following anyone helps keeping that noise ratio low. This means that when you post a question about, say, karaoke you will only get answers from people that are into karaoke.

4. Twitter and Facebook Connect: When you sign into Quora you will be able to check which of your contacts/friends from Twitter and Facebook are already on Quora. This will help you get started on the network by giving you suggestions to follow people you are already connected with, see their activity as well as the topics they are following.

Cons

1. Quora’s user base: At the moment the user base is still small but as this changes the noise ratio in the most popular topics will surely go up. I have already witnessed some questions to which the answer could easily be found by making a Google search and some other questions that are made by people that are just trying to prove some kind of obscure point without even knowing what they are talking about.

2. Spam: As Quora’s user base grows one can expect more spam, which is already happening especially on Twitter related topics. (Yes @Klout representative, this is for you.)

3. Addictive: This should also be on the “Pros” but Quora really should come with a “consume with caution” warning. Quora is addictive because, if you are like me, you will see one question and another and another and you want to answer to it or make a comment, or comment back on a comment and suddenly two hours have gone by. Of course you can consider this work, as I do for some topics, but I would strongly advise that you force yourself to only spend some limited amount of daily or weekly time on the site.

4. Anonymous users: This is, in my opinion, a big drawback. You have to register yourself to participate in Quora but you have the option to create a question anonymously and also to answer questions anonymously. Anonimity, these days, is mostly used by people that have something to say but don’t have the balls to say it using their name. That Quora supports this kind of behavior is something I still can’t understand since Quora states on their About Quora page, “Everything on Quora is tied back to a person.” Each question and answer has a revision history associated with it, and each change in the log is associated with the person who made it. People use their real names and pictures on Quora and have a short bio describing who they are; this helps anyone reading things they write to understand why they should believe what is written and take into account the author’s perspective.”

When some months ago Thomas gave me a sneak preview of Audiovoltaics and we had a long Skype chat about it, I was thrilled about, not only the concept, but that Thomas was being innovative in the way we experience music reviews on the web. If this sounds like an exaggeration it isn’t. Thomas is one of the most respected voices of the growing Creative Commons/Netlabel community and he is very well respected journalist (he is the former editor of German Beat Magazine). If that isn’t enough, Thomas knows how to write great reviews (if this sounds like a pleonasm–being a journalist and knowing how to write well–please, go to any news website and judge for yourself the writing quality of most of its contributors) and he is also a very talented musician and DJ. In a nutshell, Thomas knows and loves the industry in which he works and that passion shows in every detail of his past and present work.

Audiovoltaics Website

Audiovoltaics sets an incredibly high standard for what an online music magazine should be. It is beautifully designed, the interface could not be simpler, allowing the visitor to focus on content and, when speaking of content, the seamless integration of text, audio and video allows you to stay on the site while being able to know, in one single spot, all the useful information there is to know about a certain artist or release.

Content

Thomas knows about every aspect of music so his articles are extremely informative and detailed. In this issue of Audiovoltaics you already get a glimpse that Thomas will not stay on his comfort zone and will aim to cover all kinds of creative arts.

Highlights

The netlabel portrait section, the interview with “To Rococo Rot” and the interview with Sven Kacirek deserve a highlight but all of Audiovoltaics is filled with pleasant surprises.

The “Peepin’ Music” section is a very welcome idea applied to Creative Commons music (based on the a very well known section from Wire magazine), where a known producer listens to music tracks and describes what he/she feels about them without knowing who the artists are.

Conclusion

If you are a music lover, want to get a peek of what the future of online music magazines might be like, have access to great and well-written content, you can’t miss Audiovoltaics.

…and I am not saying this because Thomas is my friend; I am saying this because I can’t wait for the October issue to be online.

Celebrities have been attracted to Twitter and Facebook  for some time now and some have managed to master it (Alyssa Milano) and others have failed miserably (Miley Cyrus).

Today another high profile Twitter user joins the list of celebrities that, to put it bluntly, have made  an ass of themselves by not being able to understand what social media is all about: Please welcome Cristiano Ronaldo and his geo-location troubles.

The Real Madrid player, and former best player in the world, opened his Twitter account and Facebook page recently, integrated in the wave of players that joined Twitter along with FIFA’s very special contract with the micro-blogging company  for the World Cup. If high profile football players joining twitter was one of the terms of the deal that got Twitter to embrace football with disastrous results to the platform and user experience it is something that is not public. I for one don’t believe in coincidences.

I also don’t believe that Cristiano Ronaldo himself is using Twitter and/or Facebook. Someone is doing it for him and that someone has no clue to what he/she is doing.

Yesterday, Cristiano Ronaldo (or whoever is managing his account), sent this tweet (Please don’t bother to click since the tweet was deleted some hours after – more on that below)

So far so good? Cristiano Ronaldo is just keeping in touch with his followers and taking snapshots of his shopping spree at 5th Avenue, right? Wrong!

The fact that the picture was taken on a very well known avenue in Lisbon (NOT 5th Avenue in NY) was immediately spotted by Luciano Alvarez, a journalist who is a Twitter power user. Before long, another Twitter user, André Ribeiro, spotted where the photo had come from. It was taken in 2007 during the filming of an advertisement for a Portuguese bank.

The person “managing” Cristiano Ronaldo’s social media also uploaded seven photos from 2007 taken at the same time to a Facebook album entitled “NYC Weekend.”*

Why is this wrong?

I don’t think I have to refer the obvious: Cristiano Ronaldo is lying to his followers. I don’t think there is any other way to look at it.

Furthermore, this is typical from an old-media kind of thinking where information was given and not questioned by anyone. Today that kind of practice can no longer survive and it takes only a few minutes until someone spots the flaw and only a few minutes more for #Fail to show along your nickname on thousands of timelines. The only sensible thing to do would be to send a status update apologizing for this and make sure it would not happen again.

Unfortunately, this didn’t happen. The “solution” that the person behind Cristian0 Ronaldo’s account was possibly the worse one that could have been chosen: The tweet was deleted even if the picture, hosted on Twitpic remained there.

No tweet, no proof of the crime? Forget it! The hundreds of RTs that were made keep that same tweet alive and the fact that the picture was not removed from Twitpic only make deleting that tweet more disastrous, and I am being nice here.

How could this be avoided? Here are some tips.

1. If you don’t know how to use social media to your advantage, get someone to do it for you who understands the medium and understands its pros and cons and uses them to your advantage. Don’t get some amateur to do it. It is like going to play against Spain wearing All Stars and not your Nikes. (Oh wait a minute, some people actually think you did play with All Stars, but that is not the point)

2. Be totally honest with your followers and fans by making it clear that it is not you tweeting or updating the fB page but that someone is doing it for you. That way you can always blame those when the shit hits the fan.

3. Try to tweet yourself once in a while, it is not that difficult. Really: it’s like sending text messages to Paris Hilton, and you can sign it CR7 so everyone knows it is really you and not your ghost writers.

4. In this particular case how hard would it really be to take a picture in New York and post it? Come on! Be authentic and learn something.

* Thanks to Paulo Henriques for pointing that out.

Image credits: Jan Solo via Flickr

We all have to make choices and those choices usually are based on rationality or emotion.  Last night I saw the first tweets in my timeline pointing to a story on TechCrunch that can be summarized in the following way:

• Posterous created a tool that allows its users to import all of their photos hosted on TwitPic with a touch of a button via RSS.
• TwitPic didn’t like it and blocked Posterous’ servers, thus telling their users that, if they want to move their photos, they will have to transfer them manually.
• Legal battle may ensue *insert dramatic soundtrack with laugh track*

TwitPic blocking Posterous’ servers is reason enough to ditch TwitPic and move to another service but l am going to try to explain the rationale around my decision.

Posterous is only supplying a service that makes life easier for its users and only to those users that want to import their TwitPic content to Posterous. It’s voluntary and users are given the choice.

What TwitPic is telling its users by blocking Posterous’ servers is: No bloody way you are putting all of your photos on another service. If you want to do that, you will have to do it the hard way, because we want you to stick with us even if it’s against your will.

Does this make sense? Not really. It sounds like something that Apple could come up with… oh wait! They do it all the time as do mobile carriers #fact

Am I the only one crying OVERREACTION!!! here? Is TwitPic’s management so out of touch with reality that it doesn’t understand their target audience or the open web any longer?

Posterous? TwitPic? YOU!

The fact that Posterous users want to import their photos (yes, the photos belong to the users not TwitPic) hosted at TwitPic doesn’t mean that they will stop using TwitPic.

The generation that uses all of these tools are curious and want to use whatever the next new feature is on any website/application/service but that doesn’t mean, at all, that they will stop using other services exclusively. Importing images from TwitPic via RSS will not remove the images from that site, it will just add them to one more location increasing the user’s mashup. There is no casual nexus between the two and to believe that is totally wrong. One example? I have tried Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Power Twitter, SNAPTU but my Twitter clients of choice still are Destroy Twitter and Gravity. Do I have the other applications still installed? Yes! Do I sporadically use them? Yes! Do I download the latest updates? Of course! #GeekLove

TwitPic’s management might not understand but, by blocking Posterous servers, they are actually admitting defeat; the move portrays that they think Posterous is way cooler than TwitPic and that the only solution they have is to do a wall-of-China-move to stay alive, to keep their user-base from flocking to Posterous. The irony is that this is not even true; TwitPic is integrated with the most popular Twitter clients used by millions every day. It recently introduced a user-tagging and geo-location system that is very promising and has an excellent track record for reliability.

These three reasons alone should be enough for TwitPic’s genius-team *insert dramatic soundtrack with laugh track echo echo echo* to see Posterous not as a threat  but as healthy competition and, instead of losing time whining with a legal battle, they should be working on introducing new features that would attract new users and appease the current ones. What features? Slideshows, integration with Flickr, groups, a tagging system based on the content of the message field (that isn’t being used at the moment) come immediately to mind. Ah, and a visible “delete my TwitPic account” would also be nice. #justsayin

For all of these reasons I will stop using TwitPic today and will start using Posterous instead to post pictures to Twitter via my mobile phone.

Since I am not a Posterous fan boy, and only opened my account today, if I don’t like it I will start using another service that allows me to post pictures to Twitter in the same way.  I will just make sure that it is a service that is not run by people that don’t understand that users do have, and want, a choice and realize behaving like a bully only makes you look like a loser.

For more info:
Posterous
Posterous on Twitter and founders Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan

P.s. Dear Noah, please take the advice of someone who works in the fashion business for the last 5 years: You should consider updating your 1997 MySpace-like avatar on Twitter (it is okay to keep it on MySpace, no one goes there anyway).

I rely on Twitter for a lot of things: stay in contact with people all over the world, get myself updated on issues that interest me, do some research, exchange points of view with others, share content I find interesting with my timeline. If it is true that every single user can make of Twitter what they want, and use it as they want, I think it would be safe to say that the vast majority of users are on Twitter with the same or similar purpose.

I grew used to this idea that Twitter was the “pulse of the planet,” like Twitter’s founders one day want it to be. The visual idea of the planet pulsing with tweets is an image that I use often to explain what Twitter is to people that don’t use twitter.

Unfortunately, in the course of the last several weeks, the “pulse of the planet” has become weaker—so weak that it is perhaps no longer reliable.

The World Cup 2010

Twitter has been through some reality tests in its short life: Michael Jackson’s death, Haiti and the events in Iran/ Venezuela/Gaza, come immediately to mind. In spite of the fact that these events had a global impact, this impact was not a lasting one and it got diluted on Twitter’s daily information flow after a few days.

And then the World Cup happened: either you like it or not (or don’t even understand the game itself and its strange rules) football (or soccer for my American readers) is a global sport: It attracts millions of fans around the world, like no other sport does, and it generates passion like no other.

Unlike past events, Twitter (the company) got involved in a way that they had not previously done from a corporate standpoint, and created a special search page for the World Cup event. They also created and implemented special #hashtags that turned into flags for this event. Suddenly, regular Twitter uses started to feel the effects of how a global event like the World Cup can negatively impact our ability to communicate through this medium. Twitter Status mails started to be a common presence in our mailboxes, the Fail Whale once again became a seemingly omnipresent part of our daily lives. When Twitter wasn’t in full on Fail Whale mode, the service was interminably slow and blog posts about what to do when Twitter is down started to be more and more prevalent.

Last Saturday I sent out a tweet stating that if USA and Brasil were eliminated from the World Cup we would probably see Twitter working as it should once again. If you think I am exaggerating take a close look at this graph based on today’s game Brasil vs Chile.

As you can see, on the moment that Brazil scored its first goal, the number of tweets per minute using #bra were 40x more than they were 30 minutes before the game started.*  This means that Twitter’s servers were getting 40 times more traffic then they usually did and that meant the “High Rate of Errors” a.k.a. Fail Whales that users started to experience.

Please note that these numbers are already reflecting the fact that Twitter was forced to cut down its API Limit by 50% (down to 175 API calls/hour) in order to deal with this anticipated problem and even so, they couldn’t handle the massive influx of traffic and tweets.

Please keep those Red Phones connected!

There’s no doubt about it – Twitter IS an amazing tool, and its potential as a truly global communication tool is undeniable. Unfortunately, the World Cup and problems created as a result of this event evidences that there is still much room for improvement in the infrastructure of Twitter in order for it to live up to its fullest potential.

In the meantime, please keep those red phones connected, Mr. Obama and Mr. Medvedev. This is a timely reminder that relying on any one medium of communication is dangerous. And, as long as the Fail Whale is a regular when it comes to the medium of Twitter, it just makes sense to have a backup communication plan. None of us that live on this planet want a Fail Whale to get in the middle of an important and potentially final message.

UPDATE [Tue, 29 June 2010] Twitter has temporarily lowered API-rate limit from 175 to 75 but has just now restored it to 175.

* Results obtained via Twitter Search main page

Picture Credits: Ann Douglas via Flickr (Under a CC License)

Editing: Shelly Kramer

Those ideas were the excuse to get geeky and creative and come up with a solution: a separate blog, hosted here at “The Zargon” just for the Android couple.

So please visit N1&Desire’s new home, share it with, tweet it, spread the word! They are there to stay!

This something new for me but I am giving it a try. Meet “N1″ and “Desire”, an Android couple that will talk about Android and non-Android related stuff. If you find it funny please share and don’t forget to leave your comments.
Much #Android love to you all!

Once I was asked why I had a blog?

The question, which might sound an easy one to answer to, actually isn’t. I guess that the motivations to write are different from person to person but we, bloggers, all have one thing in common: we are egotistic enough to believe that we have something to say that people will be interested in.  My main motivation to blog is to share knowledge or to rant about things. This is one of those posts.

There are many posts out there from so called experts telling how you should blog but I still have to find a post that focuses on the reader. Yes, you!

The idea for this rant post started to take shape when I recently saw a comment that made me think that something was wrong, really wrong:  Ruhani Rabin has been making really useful reviews of the HTC Desire and among all the comments  there was this : “forget the htc, iPhone 4 RULES”.

Unless the person that made the comment has an IQ inferior to that of a mosquito (which I doubt since the last time I checked mosquitoes have no IQ) this is just plain rude.

To me there are 3 types of readers and they all behave in different ways:

This Blog Is My Second Home Reader

This type of reader appreciates the effort that is put in writing a blog post. There can be a difference in point-of-view but this reader always tries to put some added value with the comments it makes thus generating discussion. This is the type of reader that sees a blog as a round table and not as a stage and they take the time to sit down and give their honest opinion about what is being discussed.

The Silent Reader

This is the most common type of reader these days, unfortunately. I don’t believe it’s not Twitter’s fault, like I have heard so many people say. The silent reader, like the name clearly points out, reads, shares, bookmarks without leaving a trace apart from statistics in Google Analytics. These are very important readers and are a challenge to every blogger to get them, at least once, to comment on their posts.  The silent reader sees all the comments from the Type-1 readers and often feels like what they have to say isn’t valid or there is a party going on and they weren’t invited.

The Listen to ME Reader

This is someone that sees a blogger as someone that is on a stage and feels compelled to shout and be really succinct (in a negative way). This type of reader wishes he had a blog and still didn’t find out that everyone can have one, for free. They tend to use CAPS and the comments range from the “You SUCK” to the “You RULE” passing by the more complex “YOU ARE SO FULL OF SHIT.”

The person that made that “forget htc, iPhone 4 RULES” is this type of reader. Someone that could’ve pushed the chair, sit comfortably and tell Ruhani why, in his opinion, the iPhone 4 will be better than the HTC Desire. But this takes time and an IQ superior to that of a mosquito so, this type of reader prefers to stand at the door and shout.  This type of reader sucks.  Why? Because this type of reader is the one that still doesn’t know that there is an alphabet that goes from A to Z—that if you put some of those letters together they turn into words, and if you put those words together, oh! rejoice, you will be able to express an idea. AMAZING! Comments like “You /Your post/this app/this product SUCKS” only deserve the answer “So does your include-family-member-here and he/she/it doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable with it.”

Epliogue

A blog, as I perceive it, is a room with a round table where the door is always open for discussion so that all involved can learn, grow intellectually and establish relationships that might even go beyond online-life. All comments that bring something to that table, no matter if they are positive or negative toward the content, will contribute to that discussion and will probably invite others to participate.

On the other hand, if your idea is to make it personal and express yourself by using caps (like the use of caps will make you right) and adding nothing to the discussion, I am really sorry to tell you but YOU SUCK!

Credits: Post edited by Donna M Winter

Even with all the privacy concerns raised by some of these applications the majority of users don’t seem to care how much they share, where they share it, and with whom they share it. Sharing has become hip and, to some, a natural extension of their life such as FourSquare and GoWalla, social games that are creating a new paradigm of how brands interact with their customers by connecting what happens in the “game” with what happens in real life (discounts for 4Sq Mayors is one example).

Introducing Dapts

Dapts, Daily Achievement Points, is a very promising and entertaining idea by Matt Pacyga and Andy Kvamme. Dapts gives you something new: Choice. Using the hashtag #dapts on Twitter you can give or remove points for yourself or others—a virtual pat-on-the-back or slap on the wrist.

The code, which has been in development for some months now, monitors Twitter for the #dapts hashtag and neatly gathers all the points that are given on a score board at the Dapts website.

Had a hard day at the office and made it through without swearing? Give yourself #dapts +100 if you usually don’t curse or give yourself #dapts +500 if you usually do. Missed an important meeting because you totally forgot about it? Give yourself #dapts -200 that will add to the #dapts -800 that the people that were waiting for you will give you.

1. There is no wrong or right way to play #dapts and the system is self-regulatory. If a user gives too many dapts for a simple task anyone can subtract those points.

2. There is no need to register to use #dapts.

3. #dapts can be integrated anywhere within a tweet.

Why Dapts is Exciting

I spoke with Matt and Andy, the developers of Dapts, via Skype and learned that the current version of Dapts is just the beginning of what could be something MUCH more in the future. They are planning to develop and implement several great features and functionalities over time.

Dapts will soon have:

· Badges

· Facebook “Like” button on badges

· Badge points (these cannot be taken away by other users like regular Dapts points)

· Custom badges created by users

· Badges for badges – if user completes a badge “set” they get a special badge

· Coupons, incentives and rewards

· Geo-location

· Games

Both Matt and Andy are socially conscious and take privacy very seriously. Their passion for open standards and their genuine humbleness, which is a true particularity of those who have great potential, have me believing that Dapts is just beginning.

Below you can the two videos that the Dapts team has come up with to promote the Daily Achievements website and even if they don’t explain much about how Dapts works they are really fun to watch.

I promise to keep you all updated on this project. In the meanwhile go and give me some #dapts for introducing you to Dapts, will you? Thanks.