Connectendess — which is state of always being connected to the Internet and thus to people, things, life, work, commerce, love, hate and anger – is the single thought that dominates my mind, and it defines how I view everything, how I evaluate everything. It is my telescope and it is my microscope. I don’t see the world in silos called mobile, broadband, browser, app or television. Instead, it is all about being in the state of connectedness. I wanted to pick their brain about how the state of connectedness was going to change the future and redefine society itself.

While there were dozens of takeaways from the day-long idea fest, here’s what has stayed front-and-center in my mind: the challenges of the connected future are less technical and more legislative, political and philsophical. The shift from a generation that started out un-connected to one that is growing up connected will result in conflicts, disruption and eventually the redrawing of our societal expectations. The human race has experienced these shifts before — just not at the speed and scale of this shift.

The coming intellectual and societal upheaval brought on by the state of connectedness is aptly reflected in the recent fracas between Uber, a San Francisco-based personal transportation platform, and the freelance army of drivers who man its cars. They were protesting what they thought was unfair treatment by the company. ”They’re running a sweatshop with an app. They don’t have the balls to come down and talk to us,” Raj Alazzeh, a driver with SF Best Limo and a spokesperson for the drivers, told Liz Gannes. “Uber chooses to call us partners for their tax benefit. If they called us employees, they’d have to cover us all.”

Follow-up stories including comments by Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick seem to indicate that the protesters are drivers whose accounts were deactivated because of passenger feedback.  It is easy to understand Travis’ standpoint – our customers don’t like these drivers, so we are cutting them out. And I can understand the drivers’ point of view: They have never been rated and discarded like this before, and are rightfully angry.

Are we ready for a Quantified Society

However, if you look at the story from the context of just Uber, then you will miss the real narrative. This isn’t the last time we will hear about it — there are more Uber-like companies with on-demand workforce. There have been incidents on AirBnB.

That last comment by Alazzeh resonated with me because it encapsulates what work will be in the future and what the next evolution of labor unrest could be. And it also highlights a problem we have not thought about just yet: data-darwinism.

In the industrial era, labor unrest came when the workers felt that the owners were profitting wrongfully from them. I wonder if in the connected age, we are going to see labor unrest when folks are unceremoniously dropped from the on-demand labor pool.

What are the labor laws in a world where workforce is on demand? And an even bigger question is how are we as a society going to create rules, when data, feedback and, most importantly, reputation are part an always-shifting equation? (Reputation, by the way, is going to be the key metric of the future, Quora founder and Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo told me in an interview.)

At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?

I admit I don’t have any answers. And while I am as much of a techno-optimist as the next blogger, I don’t even know where to start. I do think it is important for us to start talking about what the etiquette of a connected and a quantified society will be.

I will use myself as an example. I would say, on most days, that I live up to my idea of a normal online citizen — living online like I do offline. I try not to talk about my family. I am an active Uber user. And I take every opportunity to provide feedback.  But I don’t take the ratings system lightly, regardless of whether I’m giving someone one star or three stars or five stars.

Just as I am not shy about awarding five stars for timeliness and quality of service, I am happy to chastise, too. And I do the same for every service I typically use — Postmates or TaskRabbit or AirBnB or Exec. What if I give someone a wrong ranking? Given how often we are likely to rank and rate in the future, will wrong ratings even bring about any sense of guilt?

It is the 21st century. We are more narcissistic and more self-absorbed. Does human decency and sense of fair play shift to the online realm as well? It’s hard to know. I mean, we have seen some of the nicest people in real life turn into a baboon’s backside once they are online and are anonymous. Authenticity in a world where we are trying to play a role in a movie starring us takes on a entirely different hue.

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The issue came up Wednesday evening when engineer and former professor Scott Hanselman wrote a post titled, “I’d like to use the web my way, thank you very much Quora.” The post pointed out that the company has started redirecting mobile users who end up on Quora webpages to download the company’s mobile app before reading answers.

And indeed, it’s an incredibly annoying tactic. Search for any topic (like, “best Star Wars movie“) and include “Quora” in the query, and try to read the resulting page on your mobile device. You can’t. The page tells you to download the app to read further, and will only let you see the first answer until you do so. On desktop, you’re asked to create an account and log in before reading. Not such a great user experience.

And then Y Combinator founder and startup legend Paul Graham weighed in on Hacker News, writing that Quora co-founder and ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo is trying too hard to gain new users the way he learned at Facebook, not understanding that Quora users are a different breed. He argued against the company’s policy of making users create accounts to read answers and comment on the site:

It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term. I’m one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site.

Quora hasn’t responded with any comment yet as to how long the “download the app” screen has been in place, or why they require users to make accounts. But it’s not too hard to see why they’re doing this: the company has raised a lot of funding ($50 million just this past summer), and it needs to see growth. While it saw early success from its high quality questions and answers on the site, it can’t become a profitable business with just a handful of readers.

A similar thing happened last summer with Twitter and its developers over API restrictions. It happened in December with Instagram and its terms of service debacle after joining up with Facebook. And now, Quora is in the limelight.

“We want to get to be 100 times bigger than we are today,” D’Angelo told Om in a January interview. So how does the company get there?

Quora has tried a lot of different tactics in its quest for growth in the past year: adding a standalone blogging platform, rewarding users who write the best and most plentiful answers, letting people embed quotes across the web, and adding an Android app.

So getting people to download the company’s app and requiring account? Not too surprising. But at some point, Quora needs to make sure that it strikes the best balance possible between demanding investors and loyal users.

Update at 10:36 PM: Quora has released a blog post explaining the rationale behind asking users to log into the site before viewing answers on desktop, explaining that logging in and participating in the discussion is a key component of the Quora product and helps keep the quality of discussion high.

However, the company wrote that it will be changing how posts can be shared, allowing users to share out Quora content to social network users who will be able to read without logging in. The full post and explanation can be found online here.

Quora business executive Marc Bodnick also provided GigaOM a statement regarding mobile viewership, explaining why Quora readers are prompted to download the company’s native apps to read:

“We’ve worked hard to create the best mobile experience with our Android and iOS apps, and we encourage users to download them for the optimal mobile experience. We are always listening to the feedback of our community, and will continue to iterate the way that we help people discover the best Quora experience on any device.”

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“We’re not going to be a place for cat photos,” said Marc Bodnick, a product and business executive at Quora who explained the product in an interview Wednesday. “We’re not a site for light, viral, multimedia-sharing without text. We’re a site where people share ideas and thoughts. So the same type of people who write answers are going to be the same types of people who write on blogs.”

The move toward blogging represents a shift for Quora, which has so far been entirely about questions and answers that users could upvote and follow. But the site, which was launched by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo in 2010, has always been about providing high-quality information to a dedicated group of readers, and in this sense the addition of blogging makes sense. Not to mention that blogging could attract a larger audience to Quora than questions and answers that require a login, setting itself up for greater advertising opportunities than it would have otherwise.

D’Angelo sat down with GigaOM earlier this month where he explained where the company is headed:

“We think at a very high level there is a lot of knowledge that is inside people’s head and is not accessible. Sure, the internet (of today) is pretty vast and big, but it is still not where we can access that knowledge that easily. So you have a blog, but a lot of people don’t have an audience or aren’t as connected and able to find the information as you. Access to that knowledge is much harder, and our goal is to make it easy. Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it.”

Quora executives are pushing the idea that through the new blogging platform, anyone with a good idea and smart writing can become famous on the site, even if that person doesn’t have a strong Twitter following or an existing popular blog of their own.

“You can write an answer that goes viral on the site despite no one following you,” Bodnick said.

And to a certain extent, this is true — there are indviduals, like the guy who wrote about his car breaking down in front of Steve Job’s house, who have become “Quora famous,” to an extent. Bodnick noted that some of the service’s “top writers“ get 30,000 views on a post per month, and some of the very top writers get up to 100,000.

But Quora attracts a very specific readership in a few key areas, like movies, technology, or startups, and the people who have built a dedicated Quora following seem more poised for Quora blogging success than entirely new users who write about topics that are less popular. If you’re blogging about Steve Jobs and post your writing under the Steve Jobs topic, which has thousands of existing followers, you could do well. But it seems fairly topic-specific, and hardly a guarantee of publishing fame.

There are also so many blogging platforms out there, from WordPress to Tumblr to Medium to Branch to LinkedIn, it’s hard to think how Quora’s new tools presents much for the average blogger — they seem likely to excite people who are already consistent Quora posters. But for those users, the platform could allow them to expand on ideas that aren’t posed as answers to questions, and a new rich text editor for mobile released in a few weeks will add to that experience as well.

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Despite the disagreements, just before the holidays kicked in, D’Angelo met with me in his Palo Alto offices, which house about 50 employees. Those who know him call him shy and quiet. And so I didn’t know what was in store for me. We ended up having a discussion that lasted about 45 minutes. Here are excerpts from that conversation.

Om: Adam, I have to say, the weekly email newsletter you guys send out is pretty damn good and enjoyable and worth reading. Especially compared to the horrible emails I get from other services. How do you guys do it?

Adam: Well, it is algorithmically created. I wanted to make something that people would read. What I didn’t want was something that was an annoying little email. It took awhile, but it has paid off. We had two people who worked on it (in a dedicated fashion) for a month, though we had been working on-and-off on it for nearly a year and a half. The email essentially looks at what people are reading and engaging (with) the most on Quora.

Om: What prompted you to start this particular company?

Adam: I really like knowledge and reading books and just generally immersing myself in information. I felt that if we could organize that, there was a huge potential and it was good for the world. I didn’t think there was something that was very good at organizing knowledge. Also, it is hard to displace companies with massive user base. For example, Facebook trying to displace Twitter. I think after a certain point it becomes really hard. I think if you look, a lot of the knowledge is decentralized and we wanted to build a core place oriented to knowledge.

Om: You recently raised $50 million and were individually a big investor in the round. Since you are putting your own money into the company, what is the plan for Quora and why are you so confident in the company?

Adam: We think at a very high level there is a lot of knowledge that is inside people’s head and is not accessible. Sure, the internet (of today) is pretty vast and big, but it is still not where we can access that knowledge that easily. So you have a blog, but a lot of people don’t have an audience or aren’t as connected and able to find the information as you.

Access to that knowledge is much harder, and our goal is to make it easy. Anything you want to know, you go to Quora and get it. And at the same time, give people a platform that is easy to use for sharing the knowledge. When you think, we are now scaling up, and a bigger set of the world’s knowledge will be on Quora and it will be more valuable. Clearly, quality is a challenge and how to keep the noise level down is going to be focus for us.

Om: You see whole series of services cropping up like Skillshare, Coursera, Udacity that are helping experts become micro-businesses. You think Quora would do this in the future?

Adam: The real reward is in the response to your answer and the fact that millions can read it. You already see more people giving and sharing knowledge for free. Lawyers and other professionals are using Quora to build their reputation and build their bonafides.

I am not sure if Quora should be in the middle trying to capitalize on it. For now our focus is on growth and getting as many people sharing and attracting as many people to the platform. We don’t know what our model is going to be — it could be advertising, pay to access and/or consult-an-expert model. We are going to try many things. But it is not the focus now.

Om: Do you see a problem with search and the internet?

Adam: Reputation is going to be a lot more important in the future especially as the internet gets bigger. It is clear that the web pages will have to get their quality up. I think there is too much focus on what is first, what is new. It has to be about what is actually worth reading that is going to become important.

I think as more people use the phones to access the internet, they have a lot less patience for trying to find things on the search engines. That is because you need to figure a lot of things out for search to work. In the past, when the web site was fast and didn’t crash, it was a pretty big deal. Now it is normal. Similarly, we will see the focus shift to quality and right information (and not the latest.) And that is why I think sharing of knowledge is going to be a lot more important in the future.

Om: Today, if broadands speeds are 10 Mbps, five years from now, they will be a gigabit per second. So what does Quora look like then? Is it still textual or is it visual, i.e. video?

Adam: There is a lot of value in text. Why? You can’t sift through a video quickly, but you can skim through text really fast. So from the aspect of knowledge, the increase in bandwidth doesn’t really change much for us.

More people on broadband will actually have more of an impact on the future. So for me, when the developing world is getting on the internet with everyone on the net at 10 Mbps — that is going to have more of an impact on Quora and the web. Ten times the people means 10 times the opportunity to share knowledge.

Om: What is the metric of success for Quora?

Adam: The real use of Quora is determined by users and the content and the topics — those are the metrics we look at.  There are not that many ideas for internet products that will be really good. It is really all about execution. Facebook too wasn’t a new idea but I think we took the idea and we focused on execution, focused on quality and getting to scale. Similarly for Quora, we want to get to be 100 times bigger than we are today.

Om: You were at FB in the early, go-go period to the adult days, and now you’re Quora’s founder and CEO. How’s that different?

Adam: We are a technology company with a focus on engineering and product. So in that sense what I do is pretty much the same. The biggest difference is that I do a lot more things these days  — working with engineers, product, data science, recruitment, and a whole lot of other things.

At Facebook, it was very familiar as I worked with people with a similar type of expertise. At Quora I have to manage different kinds of people. I have had to pick up a lot of different skills and I have had to get better at dealing with different kinds of people. I have had to learn finance, learn fundraising, and at Facebook, while I knew those things, I wasn’t ultimately responsible.

Om: Have you had to change as an individual?

Adam: At Quora, I wrote code for the first year, and then I had to stop. So now, it is more like once in awhile. I don’t have time. I feel selfish when I do write code, because people are waiting for me to make decisions on other things that I am delaying. At Facebook, too, I went from coding to management.

You have to get comfortable giving up control,  and you find people who do things better than you do. Quora now does better with the team we have built. My thoughts and time are spent entirely on recruiting and what’s on my mind is the number of good people we can hire. I spend a lot of time in schools recruiting, and it is a highly competitive market place. We do have a higher closing rate. Given that we are growing very quickly, it is still a challenge.

Om: What did you learn at Facebook?

Adam: Focus on the long term, and always do what’s right to grow the company and not make short-term decisions. And outlast everyone one.

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Cheever, who was an early Facebook employee with D’Angelo, played an important role in defining Quora’s direction from its initial start, and was just recently involved in the launch of the company’s Android app and push toward mobile.

Quora is a Silicon Valley-based company that provides a social platform for users to post and answer questions. Launched in 2010, it’s seen significant growth and mainstream appeal, although it still has strong usage within the tech community.

D’Angelo posted about Cheever’s reduced role on Tuesday evening, meeting intense skepticism from respondents, many of whom asked D’Angelo why the company didn’t provide more information on Cheever’s exit and who speculated on his departure. D’Angelo noted that Cheever will stay on with the company in an advisory role.

Below is D’Angelo’s post, which a Quora spokesman said was all the company would be releasing:

Read Quote of Adam D’Angelo’s answer to Charlie Cheever: What is Charlie Cheever’s status at Quora as of September 11th, 2012? on Quora

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The “crowdsourced” question-and-answer site Quora raised more than a few eyebrows on Monday when it closed a new $50-million round of financing that values the fledgling company at $400 million, despite a conspicuous lack of scale when it comes to users. Is this just another example of the bubble-style funding rounds that have made Instagram and Pinterest the talk of the VC business, or a sign of how much power the “Facebook mafia” has in Silicon Valley? Or is Quora really onto something that could potentially turn into a multibillion-dollar idea?

Quora has more or less admitted that it doesn’t really need the $50 million it just finished raising, at least not yet. Co-founder Adam D’Angelo said (on Quora, of course) that more than half of the Series A funding round of $11 million the startup raised in 2010 is still sitting in the bank, unused. So why raise that much money at all? As Om has noted, one reason Quora did so is simply that it could — there was apparently plenty of interest, and the company wound up with financing from original Facebook investor Peter Thiel, among others.

Raising money is easy for Quora, so why not do it?

This is the startup version of the old adage “make hay while the sun shines,” and when two of your co-founders are Facebook alumni — Adam D’Angelo was the chief technology officer of the social network, and Charlie Cheever oversaw the development of Facebook’s “open graph” platform — there is plenty of hay to be made, especially since both founders are likely to become extremely wealthy when Facebook goes public (more than a third of the $50 million that Quora raised reportedly came from D’Angelo himself). More than anything, VCs love to give money to people who don’t need it.

D’Angelo has said that one of the reasons Quora raised the funding is so that it would have more “runway,” or room to prove itself and its concept before it has to start making money. And it’s clear, based on interviews with the founders, that the company sees what it is building as a potentially world-changing idea. Both seem devoted to it not because they believe it will be easy to flip or sell for billions of dollars (which they don’t really need), but because they think there is an interesting problem worth solving. As Cheever told me in 2010:

We’re not really focused on making money right now. I think if we can solve the problem we are trying to solve, we will find a way to make money.

In a nutshell, that problem is how to aggregate or crowdsource expertise on a wide variety of topics efficiently, and it’s one that any number of startups and services have tried to tackle, all the way from Yahoo Answers and Ask.com to Formspring, Reddit and Stack Exchange. And most have failed: Yahoo Answers and others have degenerated into cesspools of uselessness and spam, while companies like Aardvark disappeared inside Google and other acquirers, never to be seen again. Facebook launched its own Questions service in 2010, but there’s no sign that many people are using it much.

Among those who have tried to attack the problem from a different angle are sites like Demand Media’s eHow, which pays writers to come up with articles that contain some kind of expertise about a topic. Interestingly enough, eHow was built by Josh Hannah — who bought it in 2004 and built it into a major player before selling it to Demand Media, and is also an investor in an open-source spinoff called WikiHow. Hannah, now a partner with the venture-capital fund Matrix Partners, is an investor in Quora’s latest financing round.

Wikipedia is the model, but can Quora mimic its success?

Despite all the failures, there is one obvious example of a successful crowdsourced knowledge base, used by hundreds of millions of web surfers daily: Wikipedia. More than a decade after it was originally launched, the site is one of the top 10 most-visited web destinations on the Internet with 15 billion pageviews per month. And even more unlikely, Wikipedia has accomplished this feat without raising any venture-capital funding whatsoever, relying solely on donations and charitable funding.

The two sites have somewhat different approaches: Wikipedia asks users to contribute links and verified facts to articles that are designed to be a one-stop source of information about a topic — contributors are explicitly not allowed to state opinions based on their personal knowledge. Quora, however, tries to get those with knowledge to answer questions about specific topics, and then the community gets to vote on which answer they like best. Both sites have strict rules about what kinds of content can be posted, to avoid the Yahoo Answers problem. As a user of the site, I’ve found the quality of the answers to be consistently pretty high.

One of the main things that has helped Wikipedia grow as quickly as it has is the fact that it ranks extremely highly in Google search results, since it is seen by the search giant as an unbiased source of factual information. Given that kind of traffic, Wikipedia could easily generate hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenues if it added some innocuous banner advertisements to its pages (something it refuses to consider). And some Quora supporters believe that results from the site could benefit from the same phenomenon, especially as Google looks for more social signals about information.

So the ingredients of a compelling story are there: founders who have their eye on a big vision, who aren’t motivated solely by a quick flip for cash, and who are trying to build a Wikipedia-style global knowledge database powered by individual input from experts. The fact that Quora’s usage numbers seem a little lackluster is the only fly in the ointment for believers — but then, there was a time when Wikipedia wasn’t really a household name either.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever & Adam D’Angelo @ Crunchies 2010

Quora, a Palo Alto-based knowledge (read: Q&A) community has raised a whopping $50 million in Series B funding from co-founder Adam D’Angelo along with Facebook early funder Peter Thiel, Northbridge Ventures and Matrix Ventures. D’Angelo, who was chief technology officer of Facebook, has put $20 million of his own money (big props for that) in Quora while others chipped in the rest.  D’Angelo co-founded the company with Charlie Cheever in 2009 and currently has about 30 employees.

The company’s valuation is said to be $400 million, which only adds to the hype around the company. About a year ago, I had heard the company was getting investment interest at valuations in excess of $300 million. The company has thus far raised $61 million in total. Surprisingly, in the most recent announcement, there was no mention of previous investor Matt Cohler of Benchmark Capital, another early Facebook employee. (Matt Cohler emailed and let me know that Benchmark did indeed participate in the round.)

And what is the company going to do with this much cash? Well, grow its team, build out its infrastructure and do stuff most normal companies do. On Quora, D’Angelo writes:

We intend to use some of this funding as a cushion in case of macroeconomic changes. More than half our series A funds from two years ago are actually still in our bank account today. We could have waited longer to raise this round, but we wanted to extend our runway. That lets us keep our focus on long-term growth and quality, and lets us avoid making short term tradeoffs like many other companies.

And then there is some laughable explanation that they will have huge Amazon Web Services bills so they need the money.

We project a large portion of this money to go to EC2 and other AWS bills. It might be replaced by whatever the most appropriate place for us to run our infrastructure is in the future but as of today it’s looking like EC2.

Appdata puts its usage through Facebook Connect at about 180,000 monthly-active users and about 20,000 daily active users. I am sure they get a lot of traffic from the Web, but it can’t be enough to justify the nosebleed valuation.

The question here is why does this service merit such a high valuation? I mean, its traffic at best can be described as middling. There is lot more fly-by traffic from search engines, but is that enough to justify their valuation? Its mobile applications is meh and more of an afterthought. The design of the service is forgettable. Some members of the team have left to work for other companies such as Pinterest and Facebook. The only thing that is actually good about the service is some of the content contributions and the discovery of content.

Now in comparison, Instagram was a startup that snagged $50 million on $500 million (rumored) valuation before being acquired by Facebook. It had great mobile expertise. It had more than 30 million members and it had a very engaged daily audience. It was content that appealed to many people and it was growing so quickly that Facebook had to buy it.

When you compare Quora’s lack of traction with another Q&A community, Stack Exchange, which liberally shares its usage data, you are left scratching your head, asking yourself, what am I missing? Of course, there is the timing. Facebook is going public soon and that essentially raises the value of anything related to Facebook, merited or not. The way I see it, it is a deal that is being done because it can be done. Or as The Wall Street Journal says, it is Facebook mafia at work.

Updated on May 16, at 8.22 am with  a statement from Matt Cohler, who intimated that Benchmark Capital did indeed participate in this round of funding.

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So what is Quora up to? The top items on the company’s list, said Cheever, are growth and maintaining a high bar for quality content – and the two are often at odds.

The thing that most stood out from our conversation is that Quora thinks of its role as one of governance. They want to design tools that encourage people to contribute knowledge that is informative and current. The company’s plans are less about features, and more about figuring out ways to get new users to make good contributions, and giving power users incentives to share more. In a way, it’s sort of like trying to birth an online version Plato’s ideal society, with participants fulfilling designated roles in the interest of the common good.

That means that while Quora’s team thinks about things like introducing user rankings as a way to organize information, it hesitates on implementation because that might discourage new expert contributors with no previous standing on the site from joining the conversation, said Cheever. Instead, Quora has recently been working on things like giving user admins tools to distinguish quality contributions, and building topic hierarchies. Another new feature recognizes how long it has been since a user visited the site, and formats his personalized news feed accordingly.

That’s a different approach from the typical user-generated site – say, Facebook – which is designed to foster maximum participation by users, without placing any sort of value judgment on what they do.

“Our No. 1 thing is knowledge that people trust,” said Cheever. “Being a resource trumps making people feel good about themselves.”

Like Formspring, another (very different) Q&A company I visited last week, Quora thinks of the contributions it inspires as a sort of “inverse blogging.” Participants aren’t writing into the void, with no idea if anyone wants to hear their opinion of the best hummus or the best startup lawyer. If someone asks a question, it’s because she wants to hear an answer. And there’s less pressure, said Cheever, to make something perfect. There’s not an expectation that something has to be polished and professional-grade, or that people have to have the skills to build their own website to share their knowledge with the masses.

Though the hope is that everybody’s an expert on something, Quora also wants to offer satisfying ways for non-experts to participate. Non-experts can do research and write concise summaries, they can recruit experts and elicit their expertise, or maybe they could just be good at finding thumbnail pictures for topics (which the site recently added), said Cheever.

Another big focus has been catering to power users. As tech insiders have been roused to share their knowledge – especially about their own products or those of their competitors – Quora answers have often become topics for news stories. (Here are some from GigaOM.) D’Angelo has even done this as himself, confirming rumors of Google’s unannounced major upcoming social product in a post that amounted to irresistible linkbait. But some users would rather keep their answers within the community, so a few months ago the company introduced a “not for reproduction” option that will ostensibly stop these posts from being distributed outside the site (I’m not sure there’s a legal precedent for disallowing fair use like this). Quora is also, by design, not currently indexed by search engines, though it plans to allow them in the future.

What about scaling to knowledge areas outside its core topics of Silicon Valley and technology (if those two things are even separable)? Cultivating a community of quality contributors is one thing, but Quora’s big test is its breadth. Some competitors, like the technically focused Stack Overflow, are instead choosing the strategy of launching multiple sites to address different topics. Cheever admitted that diversification on Quora is happening slowly, but said general knowledge about things like local information in cities, music, movies and sports, as well as more specialized areas like physics, is coming along.

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In other words, Facebook could easily increase its number of servers from current estimates of about 10,000 servers to over 50,000 servers, in order to keep up with its growth. Various web analytic companies estimate that Facebook has over 100 million visitors and serves up billions of pages every month. One of my sources had told me that Facebook was looking to spend about $9 million this year on hardware, but apparently, their needs are much bigger. All that spending should prove to be good news for Rackable (RACK), which has been a big server supplier to Facebook.

Facebook has built an enviable infrastructure. I personally believe that its desire to market Facebook Connect is a way to offload (at a later stage) some of the pressures Facebook apps are placing on its system . Regardless, there’s one exec who is not going to be around to help architect the next phase of Facebook’s back end bulk-up: CTO Adam D’Angelo has left the company, according to Kara Swisher and Eric Eldon.

Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the news and added that “D’Angelo will be transitioning out of his role as CTO and leaving Facebook to take some time off.” The company is currently looking for a VP of Engineering. Apparently, d’Angelo’s main interest was engineering, and the CTO role moved him too far away from that.

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