This week the Feather staff would like to introduce you an app called Quora, a Q&A app co-founded by former Facebook employee Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever in 2009 and made available to the public in 2010. It currently has approximately 3.5 million users worldwide.

D?Angelo and Cheever came up with this idea because they believed that there was not a single website that adequately answered questions.

“Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet,” The pair said in an interview. “Quora, on the other hand, provides a platform for its users to find answers to the questions that are too specific to be noticed on major searching engines.”

Quora allows users to sign up with their Facebook, Twitter or Google accounts, which is really convenient. After logging in, users can also sync their friends from the three platforms mentioned above to their Quora account.

The major function of Quora is asking and answering questions. When users are creating their own questions, the website shows similar questions in order to reduce the number of same questions. Users can also specifically invite a friend to answer their questions.

Quora categorizes all the questions to over 400,000 topics for the users to follow, from the ones as general as “science” to those as specific as the TV series “Mythbusters“.

After searching and following certain topics, users can both learn by reading other users’ answers and help others to learn by answering others’ questions.

On Nov. 12, 2013, Quora introduced a feature called “Stats” that they built as a dashboard for writers. This allows all Quora users to see summary and detailed statistics regarding how many people had viewed, upvoted, followed, and shared their questions and answers.

User are rewarded credits for providing a quality answer. With these credits, users can individually ask experts authorized by Quora to answer a certain question. The aspect of being able to ask experts questions in exchange for credits is unique to Quora’s platforms. However, despite this unique feature, Quroa still shares the problem of lacking credibility with most of the other Q&A apps.

Generally, Quora provides a good platform to gain interesting knowledge that we cannot easily learn in the classroom. However, since all of the answers are written for specific questions, its not a good source of studying a certain topic thoroughly and systematically.

Follow the Feather via Twitter: @thefeather. This writer can be reached via Twitter: @MojunPan.

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