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What are the main differences between Focus and Quora?
Both sites share some similarities, but are also different. How are they different?
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3 Answers
There are four major differences between Focus and Quora.
1. Target market - Focus is solely focused on delivering value to business and technology professionals. Quora is a truly horizontal service that is built to serve all markets. As both communities continue to grow, this distinction will have an impact on the quality of expertise and discourse seen on both sites.
2. Mission/value proposition - Focus' mission is to help professionals make better decisions by making the world's business expertise instantly accessible. While helping businesses make better decisions isn't especially sexy, it is important, particularly when you think about how "closed" this world is (see Gartner as an example of a closed model). Quora's mission is to take the information that's in people's heads and put it on the internet in canonical form. This is an important distinction in that it informs product development priorities and establishes guidelines for behavior on the site.
3. Expert models - Focus explicitly designates members of the community as Focus Experts. Quora does not classify members and instead uses a community voting system to highlight high quality answers. Focus made a bet on the explicit designation of Experts because of the longstanding need of businesses to point to authoritative sources when making critical decisions.
4. Content forms - This is the most obvious difference between the two sites. There are three primary features on Focus: Q&A, Research, and Events. Q&A is a highly used feature and can create the perception that Focus is only a Q&A site, but Research and Events have proven to be high impact mechanisms for delivering expertise to the Focus community. This makes sense given the average business' desire to access substantive, authoritative forms of business expertise. Quora, on the other hand, focuses almost exclusively on Q&A. Quora has also made a substantial investment in the area of community moderation/editing that is proving to be valuable.
The first and second points are really the most important ones. The third and fourth points flow out of the first two.
There are other differences between Focus and Quora, but these four strike me as the major ones that will frame and drive the future directions of both communities.
Scott
Quora is a general-purpose Q&A site with everything and anything up for discussion and no particular organizational structure.
Focus is, on the other hand, organized with defined subject areas & topics oriented at a very (no pun intended) focused audience - technology buyers and similar interested parties. For that reason Focus has recruited experts with specific knowledge oriented at those various topics to participate in and moderate those discussions.
In addition, Focus has additional resources (briefs, reports, webcasts, etc...) beyond Q&A - I wouldn't refer to Focus as a 'Q&A site' like Quora - it's much more of an online community oriented very specifically for technology buyers and experts.
Focus is.. focused on B2B whereas Quora is... kind of everything that ends up being pretty B2C. I'm excited for the potential of focus, largely due to the quality of my fellow focus experts...
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