Quick Thoughts on Quora’s iPhone App

I’d guess we’ll see a Quora iPhone app pretty soon, sometime in September. Here are some quick musings on what it could contain and its implications. This is only a short list, I’d be curious to hear what you think, as well:

• Location: Expect the app to ask for your location and then offer a tab or stream of content based on that information.
• Images: This would be big news. If Quora enables users to capture images as a starting point to asking questions based on visual cues, not mental or verbal ones.
• Messaging: If you’ve seen how fast and elegant the Facebook Messenger app is for iPhone, expect the same quality and speed from the Quora folks. Given how crummy DMs can be on Twitter, expect this to be a key feature in the app.
• Question Input: Quora enables users to ask questions via able, but only a few take advantage of this great feature. They’ve enabled questions via SMS but so far, this has largely been too buggy to stick. I’m sure they’ll promote and fix both. On the go, they’ll have an input box for questions, but they may want the user to approve it back at their desktop to ensure quality and proper topic tagging. That could be tricky.
• Question Interaction: I’d expect that it will be easy to swipe and vote or gesture on questions to vote them up. As this is more of a consumptive app, there will be lots of curation as a result of the voting.
• Answering and Commenting: Expect Quora to dissuade folks from answering and commenting on the go given the fact that answers will be shorter and less “thorough” on the go. If true, this could really separate consumers from creators on the site.
• Reading: Will be much easier on the eyes than their HTML5 site. Text will fit the screen better. I’d also imagine there will be a feature to read “offline” and mimic some of the Instapaper features that have been so successful. Ironically, Quora is one of a few sites that doesn’t allow Instapaper to crawl its site.