Quora can be an addiction. You visit the site just to see what’s going on, 30
minutes later you’re still there. Today, the addiction goes mobile. Finally.
The service has just released their first iOS native app. Tailored for the
iPhone and iPod touch, I can safely say that it’s awesome. I’ve been testing it
out for the past few days, and my own personal usage of the service has already
skyrocketed. Why? A few reasons.
First, the app is fast — really fast. “That was one of our top two or three
goals from the beginning,” co-founder Charlie Cheever says. He notes that they
achieve speeds better than you see on their site because they made a few
trade-offs in terms of live updates and overall content. But they’re also doing
a lot of pre-fetching, guessing what you might look for next. Personally, I
love that you can hop from stream to question page and back again without
having to reload everything as you do on the web.
The second thing I love about the app is that it’s location-aware. Quora
recently turned on the location element of the service, and the app takes full
advantage of it. Clicking on the “Nearby” tab brings up a list of topics in the
area around your current location. This will be fantastic for traveling.
The third thing is push notifications. If I ask a question, I want to know when
I get an answer. But I don’t want to sit around at my computer all day waiting.
The iPhone app gives you a good way to untether yourself. There are
notifications for other actions on the service as well. “We try to strike the
right balance between letting you know about important and interesting things
on Quora that you would want to know about and not overwhelming you and blowing
up your phone at all hours,” Cheever notes.
Searching, writing a post, and adding a question are all in the same middle
tab. “That’s been a tricky interface to get right,” Cheever concedes. But it
works pretty well. When you go to add a question, you first must search to make
sure it doesn’t already exist, just like on the site. When you add the
question, you can easily tweet out, send to Facebook, etc.
Another great feature unique to mobile: Shuffle. When you hit the bottom of
your main Quora feed, you’ll notice an option to “Load More…” or “Shuffle”.
Clicking on Shuffle takes you to a random question. “It’s kind of bottomless,”
Cheever jokes. Right now, the shuffle is totally random, but Quora is thinking
about tailoring it to your likes eventually.
The app was built by a couple of Quora employees (one engineer and one
designer) over the course of a few months. Yes, it’s iOS-only for now. “We get
a lot of traffic to our website from iPhones, so that made sense,” Cheever says.
You can read more about the new app here. And you can find it here.
Click to view slideshow.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5_xAfQiQxA4/
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