Are Q&A startups a threat to Google?

My tech op-ed article posted this morning at Venturebeat, "Are Q&A startups a threat to Google?", and was reposted at the NYTimes site here. [Update] Also Techmeme-ed here, which is cool since it's my favorite news aggregator.

Most of my interview transcript with Ro Choy, CEO of Peerpong, and Charlie Cheever, Co-founder of Quora, was edited out, so below are some of their additional insights:

When did the light bulb for Quora go off for you?

Charlie Cheever: Over the last few years, there have been a bunch of services that have let people put more and more content onto the Internet -- Facebook and Flickr for photos, Twitter for link sharing, status updates, etc. -- but we didn't see any great way for people to share the knowledge that they accumulate over their lives, so we wanted to make a place for that. There were other things as well. For example, I like blogging but I didn't always know what people wanted me to write about. One thing we've tried to build Quora to provide is a good set of prompts from other people that you can respond to.

When you looked at this opportunity, what were the comparables? Yahoo! Answers, Google, or others?

Charlie Cheever: We thought about all those things but we’ve mostly been focused on making a product to fill a need we saw in the world. I do think there are a lot of things that people want to know that you can't find easily with a search engine because the information either isn't on the web yet, or isn't there in a form that you can easily consume. This is especially true with long tail content.

Ro Choy: Our focus and good corollary is Google. Google can effectively find content through use of pagerank. Can we do that for people? If you believe the vast amount of knowledge doesn’t exist online yet, then if you could ultimately categorize an index of content, publish it, and make it searchable…. If you could do this for 50 million, 100 million people, or half a billion people -- that was the Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

Should Our Early Stage Company Take Money From a Strategic Investor?

This question was presented to me over at Peerpong:

"Should our early stage company take money from a strategic investor?"

My answer:

Strategic investors are usually difficult to work with if they have a strong influence as board member or major shareholder. They have their corporate interest and objectives that might not sync with your goals as a startup. I would just be very cautious and really discuss any areas of potential strategic conflict with that company before getting their money in.

The plus is obviously getting such an endorsement from a company within your space, potential "free" resources and industry connections and intelligence.

I would feel more comfortable if a strategic investor was an equal with another investor(s).

"What is the Social or Psychological Factors Which Lead People to be Drawn Into Investing Huge Amounts of Time Into Casual Games?"

This question was presented to me over at Peerpong:

"What is the social or psychological factors which lead people to be drawn into investing huge amounts of time into casual games, IE FarmVille?"

My answer:
I personally divide online casual games into two camps. There are the traditional casual games such as poker, fortress, tetris, pool, memory, etc. The second camp is what I define as "lazy casual games" or lazy interactivity (borrowing from the interactive TV space). This is a new genre of casual games, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, that are almost as mindless as channel surfing late at night when you're almost asleep.

It's lazy interactivity because it takes very little movement (i.e. clicking the mouse without precision) to play these games. You can almost be in a daze to successfully play FarmVille or maybe you're multi-tasking on two projects, eating and talking to your spouse.

These "lazy casual games" entice people with enough simple rewards or a sense of accomplishment in exchange for the perceived effort put into it, so it's a low bar for these games to satisfy the typical game player. It's similar to the offline enticement of winning tickets at Dave & Buster's or a local carnival by whacking moles or shooting water into a balloon in exchange for stupid plastic toy prizes, candy from the 1960s (literally), or tin medals.

The interesting thing for me to see would be the churn rate. How long does the average person play FarmVille and other similar games? What is the lifespan of these casual games? Do they have staying power like a traditional casual game, such as Tetris? Do people come back after they stop playing or do they never play again after the first time they stop?

"Why Didn't Existing Companies like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo Succeed at Social Networking?"

I've been trying out Quora and Peerpong lately, so I decided to post some of my answers here. It's rapid response, which I typically don't like to do, but I've sucked it up and decided such thinking is foolish since I'm not a professional journalist. Anyway, my answer to the above question:

I would say additional factors are the lack of design and marketing influences in Google's product development process. Google's engineering driven culture is the reason for its success, but also a factor in its failure in some areas. I'm not saying Google should be design driven like Apple, but a little balance is good. I also heard some product managers complain how influence tilts towards the engineers.

And once you're behind in the market, spending on advertising is a good avenue to catch up (i.e. Microsoft's Bing) but this goes against Google's mantra of zero marketing spend. Only recently has Google started to spend significant amounts of ad/marketing money to compete in the enterprise space, but it could have done this with Orkut while trying to upgrade and improve it.

The amazing fact that is sometimes forgotten is that Orkut is a top 50 site worldwide, number one is Brazil and India, and essentially the business/name card for everyone in Brazil. This is done with zero marketing. Sort of a shame that Google didn't place more emphasis on developing and marketing Orkut early on while MySpace and Facebook were just starting out.