New Boards feature on Quora

This is great timing because I got my Pinterest invitation just yesterday. Cheers to TechCrunch for the story about Quoras new launch of Boards.

Pinterest, if you haven’t heard about it, is a way to collect visual items into one place (and I love the “Prints & Posters” pins.) Quora’s Boards are a way to collect text information, which I think I will find more immediately useful, even if it doesn’t have the ooo-ah factor.

To make a board just log in to your Quora account and you’ll see a link on the right to make a board. You’ll be asked to choose a name for your board. Then you’ll be taken to an interface where you can drop in links and text (and pictures.) The links work like Facebook… put in the link and the Board automatically generates a thumbnail image if available and some context. With settings, you can change the name of your Board, how visible it is, give it topics, etc. (I couldn’t figure out how to move panels around, though, in case I wanted to “pin” some particularly good item up at the top of the page.)

I made a board for Christmas Puns, since I’m seeing “The Wreath of Khan” everywhere I look. Quora makes sure the Board links are near at hand whenever you want to update them, and there are a few mechanisms to share the Boards (though when I tried to post mine to Facebook, it failed twice. Nobody likes a pun; at least, nobody will admit to it.)

It would be good to have a few more ways to embed the board somewhere outside of Quora, and I’d really like to be able to move panels around, but this is a fast and easy information aggregator. Worth a look.