Quora is an online community that provides a forum for users to ask questions and provide answers.

Quora was founded in 2009 by Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, who worked at Facebook before leaving to start the new company. At the launch of the company D’Angelo said “Our belief is that more than 90 percent of the information people want to know is still not available on the web in a format that’s easy for them to quickly understand.” The service was in a private beta until opening to the public in June 2010. It achieve Internet phenomenon status in the first few weeks of 2011, when a flood of new users filled many inboxes with notifications of friends’ joining.

Questions are posted on Quora and community members are allowed to provide answers as well as vote up or down responses that best address a question. The site is organized so that questions are organized by topics, which allows members to follow areas of interest or expertise. Members can also follow other users.

Though similar to forums like Yahoo Answers and Answerbag, Quora has sought to create a more refined Q&A platform with quality answers from qualified experts, such as AOL founder Steve Case. In a July 2010 interview Cheever told GigaOm: “Our No. 1 thing is knowledge that people trust. Being a resource trumps making people feel good about themselves.