Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks. This is the second in a series of essays on Quora that he will post on TechCrunch. Shah is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah

In 2010, a handful of mobile photo-sharing applications unleashed armies of handset users to snap pictures and instantly share them across multiple platforms and networks: Instagram growth exploded to become a Twitter for pictures; Picplz received generous funding, Path emerged from stealth mode, Occipital enabled 360-degree panoramic experiences, Foodspotting encouraged users to capture food images, DailyBooth positioned itself to focus on the front-facing camera, and World Lens translated signs from English language to Spanish. Photo-sharing features were also embedded into existing sharing services, such as Foursquare and Posterous. (This entire arc was captured in a discussion on Quora, "What explains the explosion in social photosharing entrepreneurial activity?")

The act of taking and sharing pictures prompted many to label this a "key wedge" activity which companies could leverage in order to build out new social networks and new products or services, either around location, food, smaller circles of friends and family, and so forth. The wedge being used, in this case, is pictures as the first entry point into building something bigger. Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon laid out the theory and practice in this post.

Wedge activity isn't just confined to social picture-sharing. What if, in the case of Quora, their "thin edge of the wedge" was interaction around Q&A activity?  What markets can that wedge help open up?

On the surface, the Q&A activity at the heart of Quora appears designed to engage users around interesting people, topics, and questions with strong incentives to contribute content, as well as to participate in voting, messaging, commenting, and sharing. As it turns out, Quora’s "thin wedge" is not so thin and has triggered a new class of content creators and is well on its way to successfully tackle the Q&A problem that has been attempted by nearly 30 different companies in the past.

But I believe this initial activity is just Quora's thin edge of the wedge. The first arena the site has been successful in altering slightly is the concept of network blogging, all of which has been well documented by others—many times over. As the product matures and as contributors, consumers, and search engines crawl across the site looking for structured content, Quora could be slightly reorganized and positioned in a variety of new ways to challenge existing Internet products and services, many of which today are themselves large, multi-million dollar businesses. In no particular order, here is a list of markets where Quora could offer an alternative, leading all the way to the other edge—the thick edge—search.

• Brand Management & Customer Service: A powerful yet somewhat under-reported feature of Quora is that while the individual user can follow topics (which include companies), those topics cannot in turn follow and message individuals. Instead, individual users who work for specific companies may act on behalf of their employers or clients on Quora and work with admins to manage the topic. For instance, you can follow the topic "TechCrunch" on Quora and interact with the 20,000+ individuals who follow the same topic. Today, a brand such as TechCrunch could engage parts of its audience through Quora, which currently allows for anonymity for those who pose and answer questions, but not for those who up/down vote or comment. It's not hard to imagine a world where big brands have links to their Quora topic page on their homepage to interact with others. Quora offers brands a more civil forum to engage with users than Facebook, Twitter or other social networks without having to appear cute. Even if brands resist, enough influential Quora users could engage around a topic, such as customer service at Comcast, and create a situation in which Comcast would have no choice but to respond publicly. A few brands have already started, and this is likely to become more evident to the naked eye in 2011.
• Social & Professional Networking (including Messaging): Facebook is ubiquitous and tries to capture all activity under one roof. LinkedIn is very structured. Twitter can be a social network, but its asymmetry creates noise if not managed correctly; at its core, it is a communications and distribution channel. Google will introduce something social in nature, but it will be a challenge to create a stir. In this world, Quora straddles an interesting middle line, somewhere between a niche network of users organized around topics and a full-blown social/interest network where a Quora profile becomes a sort of personal homepage or splash page, linking your audience with your other networks. In parallel, messaging norms could change. Email is considered "broken" by many who feel inundated by spam, offers, and long messages. Twitter's forced character limit and asymmetric network presents a new model to manage inbound messages, where the user controls who has the right to message and where those messages must be less than 140 characters. Quora Messages, while open like Facebook, is clean, light, and loads fast, and is more secure than Twitter Direct Messages today. Facebook's social inbox message aggregator may end up working for personal accounts, but may not satisfy the professional end, and that is a realm Quora could capture.
• Endorsements, Reviews & Advice: By organizing people around topics and questions, combined with user identification and the ability for the audience to up/down vote contributions, Quora may also become a mechanism by which individuals and entities are publicly endorsed (or criticized). The identification system that Quora is built on, as well as incentives to contribute content, creates an opportunity for the site to act as a repository for timely consumer reviews of products (such as when the new Apple Macbook Airs were released) and services ("Is it worthwhile to buy Apple Care?"). Topics can be automatically created and collect relevant questions, where the user can search for the latest user reviews of new electronics, automobiles, and a host of other verticals.
• Content Verticals and Syndication: Quora has been very successful at creating incentives for users to contribute content to its site. According to the site itself, content on Quora can be re-posted across the Internet, subject to a few conditions and controls, and must link back to Quora. One can imagine, over time, that the reviews (as collected above) can be repurposed on larger content verticals such as automotive, health, and finance.  These may come online in new ways through Quora and be redistributed via syndication to other sites.
• Education: There are many ways Quora could invade the classroom, such as providing a complement to textbooks or periodicals, as well as classroom management software, group projects, tutorials, test prep, online collaboration tools, and so forth. Teachers and administrators could encourage students to ask and answer questions within defined topics and perhaps even within their own school topics, managed by the school itself. Where Google Wave failed as a collaborative solution, Quora may be flexible and simple enough to succeed. (One of the best answers to this type of use case was contributed by a Quora engineer, Tracy Chou: "How can I best use Quora as tool for the classes I teach?")
• Digital Media and News Discussion: As mentioned earlier, Quora has already proven itself to be innovative in the world of blogging. This contribution on its own is newsworthy and, as the successes of Tumblr and Posterous demonstrate, quite valuable. But, text blogging is just the tip of Quora's iceberg. Quora users are already sharing external links and a few photographs, so more picture- and video-sharing could make it a stronger source for news. And, as the site becomes more robust and establishes its place as a hangout for discussions around news topics, it could continue to grow to be a major source for long-form and investigative journalism.
• Expert Research and Analysis: The design and “feel” of Quora makes it possible to encourage individual experts to share sensitive information and insights. Private research organizations make a good profit conducting their own research and analysis for sale to large companies and governments. Gerson Lehman Group, for instance, is a $400 million per year business. While their reporting is deep and technical, one drawback is that in the process of research and writing, which takes time and focus, elements change within fields at a much faster rate. And, it’s costly. Research authors like Gartner and Forrestor charge premium rates. In certain instances, Quora could provide a novel alternative.

All of these scenarios are theoretical, and surely there are more opportunities I've missed. (Please add your own thoughts in comments, or chime in on Quora).  It could take many years for Quora to test these markets, if it ever does, and that will require the long-term commitment of Quora users to contribute content to the site in exchange for the opportunity to socially interact with others based on interests, to build reputations, and to collect endorsements. Over time, the content contributed to Quora will constantly be improved, refined, aggregated, and structured. Like a stone in a tumbler, the edges will get smoother. One effect of the tumbling and fine-tuning is that the site will become better optimized for search.

And, this is where the other edge of the wedge, the thick edge— will come into play. Search has undergone tremendous change and will continue to do so. The opportunities in new search methods are numerous and the future is exciting, but it's also hazy with low visibility. We simply just don't know how we'll search differently, a theme which is at the root of many of the fascinating heavyweight fights going on in Silicon Valley. There may be room for more winners, and those winners will likely have figured out how to effectively segment their users according to a variety of factors and then, according to those segments, to create the proper blend of incentives to encourage the behaviors it needs to survive. For Quora, that formula may look something like this: Small segments of curious users who feed the system good questions; slightly bigger segments who contribute knowledge to the system in response; and hopefully an enormous segment that searches the Internet in a variety of ways and somehow end up on Quora for their answer.

Photo credit: Flickr/mtsofan

A couple image assets included in the latest version of iBooks seem to have the same naming convention as iPhone apps have when they must accommodate both old and new iPhone displays. In other words, the images imply that the iPad 2 will undergo a similar transformation: remaining the same size while doubling the resolution of its screen.

If this true, you can sign me right up. Although the iPad’s IPS screen is bright and has a great viewing angle range, I’ve always found its resolution distracting. I thought I left 1024×768 behind back in the late 90s.

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Every few eons we get another RSS is dead swarm of stories, usually involving Dave Winer versus the rest of the universe. Sub-themes include dead calling is stupid, I found this post on RSS, and get off your porch grandpa. Typically Dave uses the event to launch yet another version of Radio 8 tricked out to convince us that his lack of business model business model beats traditional data silo roach motel closed software. It may sound like I am pursuing a personal vendetta.

I'll admit to some mixed emotions about Winer and his attempts to regain control of what he calls RSS but is in fact a new socially adept layer dominated by Twitter. Starting with my post several years ago on TechCrunch, I've stated the obvious, that RSS has become at best a formative technology that has led to the development of realtime social streams of citations. When Winer led the development of XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, blogging, and podcasting, he was often the single reason these technologies broke out of their original niche and expanded across mainstream media, tech platform players, and a broad coalition of individuals who could now make a difference. For Winer, success proved a difficult pill to swallow.

In calling the moment as I saw it, I in no small part was emulating what I view as Winer's incredible sense of strategy. When Twitter took off, I teamed with Winer to organize BearHugCamp, so named as the result of a post where I described Winer's strategy of bearhugging a similar technology to create more momentum and an adhoc standard. But bearhugging Winer himself only goes so far; he likes to be the hugger, less so the hugged.

This presents a problem when Winer's motivation seems to be to absorb all post-RSS innovations under the blanket RSS model. When some Google engineers produced a service called PubSubHubbub, Winer attacked it as a bigco project even though it was created expressly as an open service that could and was adopted both by Google and non-Google companies and individuals. Then Winer produced RSS Cloud, which he pitched as being unencumbered by bigco politics. Certainly having a choice is a good thing, but I found the motivation for the effort to have more to do with Winer's view of his legacy than any notable difference in technology or what is called openness.

But what I initially called out as a turning point had less to do with what RSS did and more to do with what it didn't. Twitter's social metaphor, the Follow, created a data model for extending and amplifying attention, something I had been exploring for some time beginning with attention.xml and continuing with the AttentionTrust and its attention recorder plug-in. With the ability to track and model the intersecting clouds of people, who they follow and are followed by, we could now begin to cultivate the full value of the realtime stream, its content, and its gestural metadata. RSS and its popular renderings such as Google Reader were succumbing to overload.

BearHugCamp succeeded in describing the possibilities for unifying around a defacto set of APIs that would speak across Twitter and its much smaller competitors. Perhaps too successful, because Twitter developed so much velocity that other sites such as Identica (now statusnet) using a clone of the API were vulnerable to Twitter gating realtime access to its full firehose. FriendFeed and even Google Buzz were also constrained from symmetrical access to and from the Twitter stream. Facebook's acquisition of FriendFeed has still not precipitated realtime pushing of its updates into the Twitter stream. Bearhugging has passed its moment of opportunity, at least for now.

In the aftermath, Winer has shifted to attacking Twitter as closed while promoting what he sees as an open federated approach that uses his RSS Cloud work at the center. The biggest problem with trendjacking the open meme is that the cloud makes size irrelevant. You can operate in the realtime Twitterverse with a few well-chosen @mentions and be virtually indistinguishable from any Fortune 500 megaprise. In that climate, attacking big companies for proprietary manipulation is as good as attacking oneself. From there it's a long slow slog trying to define what open is in such a way as to advance your particular proprietary interests.

In the RSS argument, Twitter is demonized for having control of the stream. Certainly the company has the ability to pull metadata out of the message body and establish a proprietary wrapper, as they've done with retweets. But to service their third-party client platform, they've made their proprietary wrapper available via their API. When you click the retweet button in the Twitter clients, the API produces this string — you: @retweeted: and the message body. In other words, your username followed by a colon (minus the @ symbol,) the @mention of the retweeted user followed by a colon, and the body with text, URL citations, and any other @mentions.

In effect, Twitter has established an open standard around the @mention syntax. When a Twitter retweet is consumed by a down-level client, the object is translated into you: RT @retweeted: message body. This format and its analog via the API are the open standard for retweets, since every other kind of manual retweet and Twitter retweets all conform to the same syntax and output. As long as Twitter retains this format, the standard persists. And it encourages other players to support the standard, thereby increasing the "lock in" for the standard. As with the way many defacto standards emerge, we see Twitter syntax being used in Facebook messages even though the @mention syntax is not officially recognized. Quora uses the @mention to push you back into its silo, rather than out to Twitter.

If the @Mention Cloud is open, then what does that say about RSS? Does RSS support the @mention extension for retweets? Probably, but if not, why not. If it's supporting the open standard, then it's supporting the broader micromessaging standard. Which makes sense for RSS, given micromessaging has garnering the lion's share of attention. Which was the whole point of my original post about the death of RSS. That's what happens when foundational technologies become oil. They live on as fuel for the new black.

This of course is hard to swallow when you've spent years struggling to get sufficient momentum to send RSS into orbit. Many of us have been doing that for years, not just Winer, but also a broad coalition of journalists, technologists, publishers, entrepreneurs, and competitors. We knew a game changer when we saw it and made it an imperative to support it until it could accelerate under its own power. And like all proud parents, at some point we have to kiss our children on the forehead and see them go out on their own.

What RSS did was create and nurture an information landscape based on the authority of the author. It allowed those authors to gain such authority both within and outside the media infrastructure of that time. But it also gave rise to a separate wave of authority, that of the reader, the analyst, the commentator, and so on. The blog post maintained its central role even as it absorbed every other document and media type, and it was joined with a seat at the table by a metadata stream of attention and gestures. Suddenly the root object was the @mention, whether a Tweet by the author, a retweet by a reader, an @mention of other such authorities, the implicit clouds of such signals.

Winer indirectly recognizes the power of the @mention. In a recent post, he acknowledges sitting on the @mention stream as his favorite view into the Twitter cloud. Of course, he mentions this (cough) in the context of explaining why he blocks anyone who spams that view by using @davewiner to force his attention. Blocking not only removes the blocked offender from his follow stream, but also from the @mention view.

Winer mentions one side effect that blocking produces, that the blocked person can no longer follow or view the blocker's tweet stream. But interestingly, blocking an identity also blocks @mention updates of that user by other people that also include @davewiner. Retweeting a post with one name which then is retweeted by another produces a conversational thread opaque to the blocker but visible to the rest of the network. That may be a desirable effect, but until Track or some more flexible block mechanism is offered, Dave's blockmention model is unlikely to gain traction.

The @Mention Cloud is the new black and nothing will stop it, just as nothing will slow the steady march toward the cloud in general. The @mention cloud scales beyond what I know to what we know, elastic in context and realtime relevance. RSS lacks the core components of the social web, and survives as a really simple reminder of how to get where we are going. Certainly it could and should be reworked to mine the @mention cloud precepts. Call it @RSS Cloud.

Earlier this week we had a special episode of OMG/JK to mark the launch of the Verizon iPhone, but we’re already back for more. I know what you’re thinking: this may be the best week, ever.

In this episode we discuss recent rumors about the iPad 2 — which will likely come with a new, higher resolution screen and a SD card slot. We also take a look at the rumors that the iPad and iPhone may soon ditch their single, iconic buttons.

Next, we examine Google’s recent bold moves to promote WebM and move away from H.264, which has the web in a bit of a tizzy as it debates what this will mean for the future of web video.

Finally, we take a broader look at some of the problems that Google has had lately, and why the public and the press seem to have been criticizing the search giant more than usual.

And yes, we do a deep analysis on rampant rumors that Facebook may shut down on March 15. Or not.

This episode ran a little long (we had a lot of ground to cover when it came to all of the negative press aimed toward Google). So we’ve included handy links below that will let you jump to each topic.

Video Links:

Our discussion on WebM

Our Discussion on the Google backlash

Here are some articles relevant to this episode:

• The Future of the iPad 2(Engadget)
• So Much For Standards, Google Says WebM Plugins Coming Soon For Safari And IE9
• Google Clarifies Their H.264 Stance, Hands Keys Of Web Video's Future Back To Flash

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Bob Muglia moved on from Microsoft this week, and I for one was not a little surprised. You see, Bob is one of the few Microsoftees that sits (sat) across the two worlds of Microsoft. One is the old world, of Windows and Office and the predominant position in the technology community. The other is where the company sits today. Bob was comfortable in both places, in a way that no-one has been since, well, Bill Gates roamed the halls.

That's not to say that Bob is a direct peer of Bill, but rather that Bill was able to sit across old and new through sheer force of saying it was so and therefore making the distinction irrelevant. Bob had a more parochial role, but his understanding of the underlying dynamics, what the strategy was and would be, was comprehensive in its ecumenical flavor. When he and Ray Ozzie played doubles with the media, they fit together in surprising ways.

Such was Bob's skill that he would turn a softball aimed at Ozzie into a screamer hit back at the unsuspecting questioner. Ask Ray whether Silverlight was going to replace Windows Presentation Foundation and effectively subsume Windows into an Internet OS, and he would say no by saying yes. Then Bob would say yes by saying no. Put the two together and you got one answer. Tuesday that answer changed.

When Ray Ozzie quit, there was a reasonable interpretation that things would continue as planned. When Bob Muglia quit, you could no longer make that assumption. Ray had Bill's blessing, Bob had a business unit with growing revenues. In effect, he was a consigliore to Ozzie, the guy that could manage the often challenging relationship between what makes money at Microsoft and what that would have to become in the Cloud era. Put another way, he could walk into a poker game with Sinofsky and put some chips down to call a bluff.

The bluff is that Windows revenue trumps everything, that Windows Phone will get its share, that a Microsoft tablet will stop both Apple and Android from eating the heart out of Office. As we found out on today's Gillmor Gang, Google is being called on another such bluff. Namely, that yanking H.264 from Chrome is all about the open Web. That WebM will stop Apple from eating the heart out of Android and Chrome and maybe YouTube. Already Google is re-explaining the move.

But not soon enough to stop Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek and me from having some fun on the Gang this week. Danny Sullivan's filibuster about who is the better friend of the user is worth the price of admission alone. Robert Scoble is getting smarter by the week, and Kevin Marks, well, it was fun to see the ex-Googler voice outrage at Google's moronic move. Even noted Android fanboy John Taschek recognized that the more pressure Apple puts on the carriers, the happier users get regardless of which phone they buy.

In the good old days of tech media, Microsoft led the charge in impossibly convoluted contortions around self-interested maneuvers. Today Google has taken over that role. And the new Microsoft stands as a pale shadow of itself, fighting tooth and nail to rescue defeat from the jaws of victory. With Steve Ballmer as Donald Trump: Nice job, Bob. You're fired. Thanks for the material, guys.

On Wednesday, it was announced that a game called Minecraft had hit a million sales. This probably isn’t the first time that you, a denizen of the internet, have heard that word. But unless you’re in the habit of following up on every mention of every indie game you happen to see, there’s a good chance this particular title might have slipped under your radar.

So what is this Minecraft, and why is everyone talking about it? And more importantly, why should you care?

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