If you haven’t heard about Quora, it’s yet another question/answer site on the web. People pose questions, and you can view questions and answer them. I’ve heard it described as “StackOverflow, but for anything”, which is roughly true, even if I think they want to be more. There are tons of Q&A sites out there, but I think there is clearly room for more, or better ones — none of them seem to get it quite right in various ways.

Here’s my thoughts/observations on Quora:

• It’s currently very much still inhabited primarily by the Silicon Valley crowd. Half the questions seem to be about web startups or related topics. I’m sure the userbase will branch out eventually, but until it does, it’s somewhat difficult to anticipate how the feel will change.

• I want it to be more real-time. I’m fairly good at using Google to answer questions, so if I post a technical question, it’s usually just because I’m too lazy to go digging myself. But if I don’t get an answer back quickly, I’ll tend to time out and just go do the work myself. In my experience, it hasn’t been fast enough to avoid that timeout.

  I do have the advantage that if I want opinons or answers to more subjective questions, I can ask Zephyr, MIT’s instant messaging network, which I describe as somewhat like a cross between IRC and Twitter. It’s possible there’s more value here for people who don’t have that resource.

• Quora seems to encourage a model where users respond with mostly-distinct, authoritative answers, rather than being a forum where the community can collaboratively work together to converge on the answer to a question. I don’t know how this compares to other Q&A sites (I don’t really use any of them), but when someone on Zephyr asks a question, it’s quite common for one person to throw out a guess (noted as such), or partial answer, and for whoever else is around to start from that guess and go to Google, Wikipedia, or other references, reporting progress as they go, until they arrive at a satisfactory answer.

  I would love to see a Q&A site for the web that harnesses the same sort of collaboration to find answers to questions that no single person already knows the full answer to. Quora isn’t that (yet?), and so it remains much less useful to me than Zephyr. I’ll be curious to follow where it goes, though. $11 million probably opens a lot of possibilities.

What it is, is an emacs implemented in Javascript, for the web. This means on the one hand that it acts like emacs. Most of the basic emacs keybindings are supported — you open URLs with C-x C-f, and have buffers you can switch between with C-x b and so on.

However, what is also means is that internally, it is fully an emacs, with all the extensibility and all the other things that applies. The UI you see is just code written on top of a generic core, that implements the core emacs primitives, including

• The basic buffer datatype. But instead of being a plain text store, it’s instead a full Gecko XUL/XHTML DOM.
• A self-documenting command infrastructure and variable infrastructure, that lets you look up the documentation and definition of any command or configuration variable.
• keymaps accessible from javascript that map keys and key sequences to commands, letting you rebind any key from your configuration code, and define new modes with completely new keybinding sets

In other words, it really is not just an emacs-like frontend to Gecko/Firefox, but is a full platform on top of xulrunner for writing interactive applications in javascript/html/css like emacs.

I predict it’s only a matter of time before someone

• Adds the ability to edit local files and becomes a full text editor that can actually start to compete with emacs. At that point people will start to port things like emacs-vc and all the Nice Things we’ve come to expect from emacs, and
• Writes a mailreader for it ;)