Facebook had a very similar product launch in 2010 called "Questions." It not only distributed to your friends, but actually used graph data to surface to niche experts in the space of the question (similar to quora). That product flopped around for about a couple years before it was killed due to lack of valuable engagement.
I agree with what Biz is saying - "knowledge is very different from information." But I think the problem is that a lot of information already has knowledge layered on top of it in the form of indexed and searchable web objects, so for mundane questions like the example used, encouraging people to share the answer instead of retrieving it from an existing source is just wasted energy.
I agree with what Biz is saying - "knowledge is very different from information." But I think the problem is that a lot of information already has knowledge layered on top of it in the form of indexed and searchable web objects, so for mundane questions like the example used, encouraging people to share the answer instead of retrieving it from an existing source is just wasted energy.