The second-most popular activity on the Internet (ego stroking) just got yet another site. Silicon Valley's latest flame, Quora, the increasingly popular question and answer site founded by a team of former Facebookers, deliciously displays every user's follower counts, as well as the number of times they are mentioned, on each profile. With such numbers flowing freely on the site, it was only a matter of time before a smart coder found a way to rank the top users and post a leaderboard. First to the game is QuoraTop, authored by Gri.pe's Matt Mastracci, which polls Quora daily for users' following counts and shows who's garnered the greatest following.Spawned from the popular Quora thread "Which Quora users have the most followers?", which to date has been tweaked manually, often by the same people being included in the list, eager to climb the Q&A social ladder, QuoraTop shows few surprises among the top followed people - which often correlates more closely to their visibility from other networks and previous job history than their supposed activity within the network itself.
The Top 3 Non-Banned Quora Accounts
Top users, as shown by QuoraTop, have names well-known to the Silicon Valley digerati, from Robert Scoble, Ev Williams, Kevin Rose, Tim O'Reilly and Jason Calacanis to Mike Arrington, Leo Laporte, Loic LeMeur, Biz Stone, and Daring Fireball's John Gruber to round out the top ten, with just under 7,000 followers. Scoble tops the list tonight with 16,686 followers, about a 10% conversion rate from his follower count on Twitter. Quora cofounder Adam D'Angelo enters at position #20 with 4,433 users, just ahead of the first woman on the list, Laura Fitton, who hits the #21 position. Tara Hunt is #26 overall and Gina Trapani is #37, three women outnumbered by men more than 10 to 1.
Quora's top followed users include popular founder CEOs including Ev Williams, Loic Le Meur, and Dave Morin, fomer CEOs like Steve Case and Craig Newmark, and of course, VCs like Marc Andreessen and Dave McClure.
If you look closely, you can see the aftereffects of Twitter's suggested user list bringing many followers to less-active users of the site. It's widely assumed that once celebrities with their millions of fans on Twitter start to also use Quora, the digerati could be swamped by Hollywood, but it's early days.
Dare to stare at the numbers and see if you're on the Quora leaderboard, or if you've missed anyone? Check it out at http://www.quoratop.com/.