Trending Threads on Quora by Rakofi

Two of my good friends who love to hack on Twitter spent the last weekend cooking up something new, Rakofi, which is the first instance of a different interface to interact with your Quora page that I’ve seen, though I’m sure there are others floating around. The ideas these guys had was to find a way to cleanly present the top “Trending Questions” — a la Trending Topics on Twitter — but for Quora. You can select a few ways to organize the stream, either by the Top Daily Questions, the Top Weekly, the Top Monthly, or a Live Stream. The screenshot above is for the Weekly Top 20, which is interesting as a digest form to review what the “Quorasphere” discussed last week, such as the discussion around Larry Page becoming CEO of Google, or Charlie Cheever’s post about Quora’s scale up, or the awesome posts on Quora about “The Dark Knight” and Lucretia Pruitt’s very brilliant “Welcome to Quora” opus. It also debunks the myth that Quora is a tech and Silicon Valley phenomenon, with threads such as “What are the Biggest Problems Facing India?” While this wasn’t created using the Quora API, these guys used an interesting tactic to add weight and rank the threads: they monitored which questions were most signaled on Twitter. Note that this isn’t personalized for you, either, but everyone will see the same thing. That means there is no weight currently applied to see who else is following a particular question or who else has answered, etc. There is no refinement based on location, etc.

This is a clever way to organize content and helpful for the reader to digest what trended on Quora by watching what trended on Twitter. Check it out at www.rakofi.com by @thathoo and @suchitagarwal— it will be great to see more hackers continue to experiment in the never-ending quest for the best user interface (screenshot below).