Why Quora’s New Boards Feature Makes It a Better Network

Quora's relationship with the Q&A format is no longer exclusive. As of Tuesday, you can also use the site to arrange content from around the web on Pinterest-like boards.

While the move seems like an odd one for a startup most often defined as a Q&A platform, it also opens up an opportunity for Quora to become the most prominent interest-based network — a chance the platform didn't stand while married to Q&A.

"It's like if it were really easy to create lots of sub-Twitter accoutns for yourself," Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever tells Mashable about Quora's new Boards feature. "Social services tend to pull you toward a set of shared interests within a group, but if you're interested in something else, there's not a great place to talk about it."

On Cheever's Twitter feed, for instance, a lot of people tweet about football throughout the weekend. About as many people complain they hate it when people tweet about football. With Quora boards, someone who likes football can create a board for it and spare their football-hating fans from quarterly game updates. Meanwhile, football haters can still follow the same person's board about tech news. It's different than following people; it's following interests.

The Q&A site has actually been an interest-based community for some time. Users have been able to follow both others on the network and threads on specific questions as updates in their news feeds. But there have been a couple of factors that limited its capacity as an interest-based network. The first is that there has been no good way to curate questions under topics that can be followed. Quora introduced "topic groups" in June to solve this problem by creating feeds of questions relevant to certain topics, but they aren't available for every topic and can't be created instantly.

The other factor holding Quora back from functioning as an awesome interest network was that the feed was restricted to content created on Quora, whereas other social networks like Facebook and Twitter have the wealth of the Web to draw upon.

Boards hit both of these birds with one stone by allowing users to create new topics with content from both Quora and elsewhere.

Quora already allowed its decently sized userbase to share their expertise, approach topics from different angles and follow their interests rather than people. Now it does so in a way that makes it easier to follow more content, and thus more likely to scale.