Completely disagree. Quora have done a whole bunch of very smart and innovative things that lead their Q&A site to be a very different beast from Yahoo! Answers / Mahalo / Stack Overflow etc.
* They are the first Q&A site I've seen that is completely personalised - you only see questions that are either followed by your social graph or apply to the topics you have selected.
* Questions are owned by the community, not the person who asked the question. It's actually pretty hard to figure out who asked a question in the first place, and other people can improve the wording, apply topics etc.
* They don't use a dumb points or badges based incentive system. Instead, their incentives are much more subtle - it's all about seeing how your peers respond to your interactions. The "thanks" button is a lovely example of this.
In 2002, would you have said "There's nothing innovative about Google in terms of technology or concept. It's a search engine. No more, no less." ?
But I don't think they're a "blogging" innovation. That's just a catchy headline.
They might not be themselves differentiators, but they are indicators of a differentiated understanding of how to design a good Q & A site that elicits high quality content from high quality contributers.
Technology is no longer the only differentiator. We've moved far enough "up the stack" that there are lots of ways to differentiate in consumer internet beyond better algorithms.
Do Craigslist, Facebook, or Twitter have anything that's, in your opinion, "differentiated"?
I think Craiglist and Twitter had first mover advantage.
Facebook definitely started with the network effect. It was far technically inferior to Myspace and Friendster when I first signed up.
I only joined because of the exclusive feel which soon changed when they branched out. Many of my colleagues and I have said we never would have made a Facebook account if it was public like it is now.
Agreed, but this: "all the Valley insiders they've gotten to use it." is a big one. Social sites are generally winner-take-all. You use it because of who's on it.
To me, most of the points that Scoble mentions are a result of the quality of community. None of those features would matter if there weren't engaging people and discussions on the site. As to whether Quora made the community, or the community made Quora, I don't know enough to say.
Quora's Webnode2 and LiveNode[1] systems are very innovative and simplify the creation of real-time web applications. In fact, I believe Quora's choice of tackling the Q&A space is merely to demonstrate the power of these two systems.
One recurring problem in creating real-time web applications is how to sync the display between browser windows/tabs amongst different users (and of the same user).
You can render the page, stream compact JSON data to the browser, and use the data to update the page with javascript. However, doing so likely require you to duplicate your server-side templates on the client-side. You can, of course, avoid duplicating your template code by only implementing them on the client-side. However, doing so will hurt your site's SEO because your webserver would now generate JSON data instead of rendered HTML that search engines understand.
Duplicating template code increases complexity while removing duplicate code using client-side-only templates hurts SEO. This is the problem that Quora solved. Instead of streaming compact JSON data, Quora streams rendered HTML that updates any part of the page (not just a section of the page).
From an answer Charlie wrote: "If I were making a new website from scratch without LiveNode, the first thing I would do would be to rebuild LiveNode. Pretty much everything about web development is easier and faster and more correct using it." [2]
One of Abert's (Quora Engineer) tweets: "Going back to Django after having used Livenode is just painful." [3]
Long answer: there is (IMHO) absolutely nothing innovative about Quora in terms of technology or concept. It's a Q&A site. No more, no less.
The only noteworthy thing about Quora is the marketing success in all the Valley insiders they've gotten to use it.