(Photo: Screencap)

Google made no attempt to top last year's I/O keynote, featuring skydivers. Instead, viewers were treated to a long, rambling meditation on progress from Google CEO Larry Page, who seemed none too keen on talking about Google Glass.

“Technology should do the hard work,” Mr. Page informed us all, “so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.” He also suggested that, "being negative is not how we make progress." Somehow we doubt that outlook inspires Mr. Page to let his underlings off lightly when they screw something up.

The closest thing to a skydiver was when Robert Scoble popped up at the front of the line for Q&A, announcing himself as "one of the first glassholes." "Robert, I didn't appreciate the shower picture," Mr. Page replied.

But there were a few big announcements.

Google Maps Revamp The company has spruced up its flagship Maps product. Power the old gal up, and you'll get personalized recommendations and reviews from friends. Plus, you can now click on any point on the map and you'll get an info card with the option to get directions or open up StreetView--no more click-and-dragging the little orange man.

You also have the option of "EarthView," which is basically just Google Earth integrated into the service--no more downloading a separate app. You can now zoom all the way out to space and, apparently, see real-time weather conditions. (Not that that'll tell you whether you should wear a sweater tomorrow or not.)

Search You know that scene in Star Trek: The Voyage Home where Scottie picks up the mouse of the Apple II and tries talking to the computer? "The keyboard? How quaint."

"I dreamed of building that computer one day," admitted senior VO of search Amit Singhal when he took the stage to introduce today's big roll-out. "Little did I know that I would grow up to become the person responsible for building my dream." Google Now's conversational search is now available on the desktop (via Chrome), complete with voice recognition. You just say "OK Google," and away you go. This will make it incredibly easy to research luxury vacations while lying in bed eating leftover pizza, so thanks, Mountain View!

Plus Google Now is getting things like voice reminders and public transit info.

Google + A redesigned, card-based interface. Looks like the love child of Google Now and Pinterest. Photos look better. There are some hashtags. Zzz. Their "machine-learning algorithms" are also going to help you weed through your vacation photos. Thanks, HAL 9000! Also, they rolled out Hangouts as a cross-platform messaging app, available on Android, iOS, Gmail, etc.

Also among the announcements: a new subscription music service, atrociously named "Google Play Music All Access," to compete with Spotify; Google Wallet integration with Gmail.

Next year, Larry, bring the car.

GOOD MORNING. (Photo: Google+)

News broke late Friday night that daily deals site LivingSocial was hacked, exposing the personal data of 50,000,000 users. [New York Times]

Robert Scoble showered in his pair of Google Glass and everyone on the Internet cried themselves to sleep. [Google Plus]

Jack Dorsey has a new plan for world domination: revamping how McDonald's charges you for that Big Mac. [USA Today]

Facebook is losing users quickly as many decamp for new social network experiences on platforms like Path. According to one study, just last month the site lost 6 million U.S. users, a 4 percent drop. [The Guardian]

What you Google can predict how the stock market behaves. Time to buy all the stocks in "Sergey Brin arms" then? [BBC]

Zuck apparently wears a t-shirt while swimming in the ocean. Who's surprised? [Valleywag]

Mr. Scoble and his advisees (Photo: Twitter/jonmarkgo)

"Now, it sounds like kind of a joke," Jonathan Gottfried warned us before launching into an explanation of Drunkspotting, an app that lets users upload photos of drunk people and then draw on them. (Think Instagram meets DrawSomething meets jello shots.)

Mr. Gottfried, a developer evangelist at Twilio, also served as a conductor for this year's annual StartupBus competition. While roadtripping to SXSW, 37 teams hacked together startups and prototypes on the fly, with judges declaring a winner in the middle of the interactive festival.

Drunkspotting was actually formed on a shuttle bus after the prizes were awarded. "There was another team from the Mexican bus called Cloudspotting that had developed an app where you take photos of clouds and draw on them," Mr. Gottfried explained. "It was kind of cutesy and fun. Drunkspotting started out as a parody of that, but it quickly became very very serious."

Or at least as serious as a startup with 46 CEOs can be.

The real winner of the Startupbus competition was a much more high-minded venture: CareerMob, a job search site for veterans that helps match military skills to civilian openings. "Essentially every military member has a code that they are assigned, which corresponds to their position and from that you can actually determine what training they’ve had and what kind of skills they’ve developed," Mr. Gottfried explained. The site, which was created by a New York City-based team that included one active duty Air Force member, already has interest from investors and companies who want to be part of the job database.

Dude, where's my privacy?

But Drunkspotting isn't the first startup idea that relies on overindulgence for content--and it may have some (wobbly) legs.

Both Mr. Gottfried and Robert Scoble advised Drunkspotting, which launched an HTML5 app and plans on releasing an API and native apps for mobile. (The cofounders' attempts to raise funds to combat liver disease, however, clocked in at just $200.)

On the phone with Betabeat, Mr. Scoble called it a fun app. "We all have smartphones now and there’s these new breathalyzers that just shipped at SXSW called Breathometers," he said. If Drunkspotting found a way to hook it up to the Breathometer, "I could forsee a whole new way of playing drinking games, I guess," he added with a laugh.

Early traction came from the beer-soaked hordes in Austin, with users uploading images of attendees like Ashton Kutcher, Shaq, Coolio, and Dennis Crowley. If you ask us, blowing up your drunk friend's spot is kind of a party foul. That might be why Mr. Scoble recommended some sort of "privacy model," so that pictures could only be shared with friends.

"The problem, if there is a problem, is that drinking games encourage bad behavior," Mr. Scoble added. "On the other hand, it has a social aspect of catching you in your bad behavior and then making fun of it. So it’s a social retardant on drinking too much."

Jacek Michal Grebski, one of Drunkspotting's many cofounders, had a more blase attitude about it over email. "Celebrity drunkspotting is still pretty funny, I mean this is Perez Hilton's dream come true. Right? Or did we just make him irrelevant? ;)" he told Betabeat.

#Wastetherainbow (Photo: Flickr)

We first met Mr. Grebski at a the third annual Awesomest Journalist Party where he was sporting wristbands that lit up when you knocked them together and a Drunkspotting branded "Waste the Rainbow" t-shirt.

"We're kinda hoping for our second cease and desist from Wrigleys," he confessed by email this week. In the meantime, Mr. Grebski and the rest of the team are working on moving the app to more scaleable server architecture before they push it out to college campuses and add anonymous commenting and social sharing.

Regarding monetization, he said, "We have a few meetings set up, but in all honesty, we'll just figure it out later, or maybe sell for 101 million, because it'd be funny to go bigger than Mailbox. ;)"

Sure, why not.

"The cool part about all this," Mr. Grebski added, "is that we're pretty much breaking all the 'laws' of how you 'should' do things in the startup world, it's a little bit joke, a little bit serious, and a little bit trolling the startup ecosystem."

Who isn't a troll these days?

Sweet ride, Mr. Draper. (Photo: Screencap)

Remember how, once a year, your high school's assistant principal and algebra teacher and the starting quarterback would all gamely appear in a student-made video, usually to celebrate Homecoming?

You probably won't be surprised to see a similar phenomenon in Silicon Valley. 

The team at content discovery startup Undrip has made a new music video called "Lucky Ones," which is "dedicated to the people who fight every day in the trenches of entrepreneurship." And they roped some big names into participating. Featured: Alexis Ohanian in a Hipmunk hoodie, Robert Scoble boogieing in front of a Rackspace logo and, best of all, VC Tim Draper wearing a pink polka-dotted tie and dancing in a parking lot.

He lip-syncs to the line, "Waiting for their chance to come up like a pop tart," then illustrates the point by popping out of a car door.

The video is part of a campaign to raise money for small businesses hit by Hurricane Sandy, starting with three in particular: Staten Island's Not Just Bagels, Rockaway Beach-based Bungalow Bar and Restaurant, and Jersey Shore Apparel.

Here's the video:

I'll Take Stingy for $5, Alex

Hacks/Hackers has a very welcoming attendance policy and routinely waives fees for students so that no one gets shut out. But if your portfolio's aggregate revenue teeters up into the billions, just pry your hands off the fiver, dude.

App Maker, App Maker, Build Me an App "Did you know Spotify only has 53 apps?" a tipster wrote in Betabeat earlier this week. We had not. But considering how quickly third-party apps helped grow sites like Twitter and Facebook, it didn't seem like a good sign. That might be why the tipster reported that Spotify is asking big publishers to help them get saturation. Perhaps the meetings went well. At last count, Spotify's app store is now up to 57.

Scobleized After that phreakin Pheed Forbes piece was passed around, prolific blogger and "technology evangelist" Robert Scoble decided it was time to sign himself up for the new social network, which has gained popularity with celebs like Miley Cyrus and Paris Hilton and purports to rival Twitter. "Great, another social network. Yes I Pheed," he tweeted, almost like a humblebrag, along with a link to his Pheed feed. But the new site didn't seem to live up to the Scobleizer's exacting standards. "I am on Pheed but so far I prefer Facebook," he wrote on his Pheed. " Personally it is Twitter's fault that this was born. Twitter refuses to innovate. Lists, there, suck, for instance. It is why I moved much of my time to Facebook. Anyway, now I can say I Pheed too!"

Power tweeter and Radar writer Alex Howard (a.k.a. @digiphile) took Mr. Scoble to task for his impolite introduction. "You came here just to say you prefer other places and that Twitter features 'suck?' Ouch. Wonder how people here will interpret that introduction. :)" Hey, it wouldn't be an early social network if the tech elite weren't arguing on--and about--it.

Thiel Treasure Facebook and Paypal investor Peter Thiel is apparently having investment discussions with Airbnb. If all goes well, a $150 million or so investment from Mr. Thiel would make Airbnb very valuable, to the tune of $2.5 billion. Citing sources familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reports details of the deal are still up in the air, but Airbnb investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital are still on board for the second round as well. Now if only we could convince Mr. Thiel to list his mansion on Airbnb...

Sing Me to Sleep Gizmodo blogger Sam Biddle shared an earnest college memory with his devoted Twitter followers. "You're my favorite TV channel, no lie," he tweeted at MTV Jams, a hip hop music video channel from MTV. "I spent a sad amount of time watching MTVJ in my apt. senior year." Perhaps Mr. Biddle should consider becoming a Rap Genius site member?

As always: Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com We've also implemented an anonymous tip box for you covert tipsters out there; you can find it on the top-right corner of our homepage.

Zuck says be relevant or else. (flickr.com/gpaumier)

Tech startup personality and Rackspace Internet talking guy (seriously, what do you call Mr. Scoble, anyway?) Robert Scoble inadvertently ran afoul of Facebook's vast, hydra-headed Cthulhu-armed cyber-nannyism today. This is news on a Saturday in early May:

...Robert Scoble, the well-known tech startup enthusiast, went to post a comment on a Facebook post written by Carnegie Mellon student (and TechCrunch commenter extraordinaire) Max Woolf about the nature of today’s tech blogging scene. Scoble’s comment itself was pretty par-for-the-course — generally agreeing with Woolf’s sentiments and adding in his own two cents.

But when Scoble went to click post, he received an odd error message...

The message stated Mr. Scoble's comment seemed "irrelevant or inappropriate" and would not be posted. If he wanted to post future comments, he would need to "make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way."

Mr. Scoble's comment couldn't be more innocuous:

I'm so glad I didn't start a media business. It's actually really tough to get new and interesting stories and to avoid falling into drama. People forget that Techcrunch was built step-by-step as a new publishing form was taking shape. PandoDaily doesn't have that advantage and, is, indeed, facing competition from social networks that is quite good indeed.I no longer visit blogs. I watch Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, along with Hacker News, Techmeme, Quora. These are the new news sources.

Plus, Pando Daily actually doesn't have enough capital to compete head on with, say, D: All Things Digital or The Verge, both of which are expanding quickly and have ecosystems behind them.

As TechCrunch notes, there is a positive side to Facebook's efforts to combat obscenity and trolling, but this seems bizarre. Comments on Mr. Scoble's Google+ page indicate some of his followers there believe his error was in mentioning Google+.

Facebook has yet to comment on the situation.

UPDATE: Robert Scoble replies with an update as to what may have happened in the comments at the bottom of this post.

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (a.k.a. "The Guy with the Red Tie"), founder of GarysGuide, mentor at ER Accelerator and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over forty red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.org.

So, last week NY Mag wrote an article titled Bubble Boys which takes a look at some of the young upcoming hackers & coders (future Mark Zuckerbergs) in Silicon Valley. While the piece itself was pretty interesting, one thing gave me pause. No girl hackers or coders were profiled. Not to give author Christopher Beam a hard time as this probably was just an inadvertent omission, cuz surely there must be at least one profile-worthy hacker girl in the valley. Hopefully he's working on fixing that flub. :)

Meanwhile, I thought this is as good a time as any to shine the spotlight on some amazing folks in the NY tech scene who are working tirelessly to help bring more women into the startup and tech world, cuz while the ratio is improving, it still isn't where it needs to be quite yet. These include Sara Chipps and Vanessa Hurst of Girl Develop IT, Rachel Sklar and Emily Gannett of Change The Ratio, Adriana Gascoigne and Tommy Jenkins of Girls In Tech NYC, Nelly Yusupova of Webgrrls NYC, Tania Yuki and Jamie Lee of Women in Media, Shaherose Charania of Women 2.0 and Founder Labs, Janet Hanson of 85 Broads, Anna Akbari and Nicole Skibola of Womens Collaborative NYC, Stephanie Hanbury-Brown and Peggy Wallace of Golden Seeds, Angie Grabski of Step Up Womens Network NYC, Cindy Gallop of If We Ran The World and many many more. If I've missed any, lemme know.

Also check out Betabeat's 25 Women Driving the NY Tech Scene and the New York Observer's 50 Media Power Bachelorettes, LuminaryLabs' Sara Holoubek's Field Guide to NYC Female Founders, Influencers & DealMakers and HonestlyNow's Tereza Nemessanyi's post on the need for an XX Combinator incubator for women.

There are also quite a few women-in-business themed events this week in NYC including Crain's 50 Most Powerful Women NYC, The WomenSphere Summit, Women in Media Meetup, Womens Collaborative NYC and SheStreams Conference.

So go check them out and spread the word!

And now, onto our awesome lineup of upcoming boozing-and-schmoozing events (and trust me, there's a ton of them this week!)

Mashable Social Good Summit 2011

What's that? You want me to find u an event where u can go hang with billionaire Ted Turner, supermodel Christy Turlington, actresses Mandy Moore and Geena Davis, tennis star Serena Williams, cyclist Lance Armstrong and Archbishop Desmond Tutu? You got it, pal. :)
Monday, 9 a.m. @ 92 Street Y, 1395 Lexington Avenue

NY Angels Venture Creation Workshop Series: The Online & Mobile Advertising Eco-System, Who is Making Money and How
Wanna learn how to really make money in mobile? Well of course u do! Giving u all the inside dope will be Jeffrey Silverman (NY Angels), Scott Hoffman (Cliqology), Geoff Judge (Partner, iNovia Capital), Nick MacShane (Founder, Progress Partners), Brian Kaminsky (Group Publisher, Huffington Post / AOL), Art Muldoon (Co-Founder, Accordant Media), Albert Azout (CEO, Sociocast), Moritz Loew (MSNBC Interactive), Scott Meyer (CEO, Evidon) and Jon Greenwood (GM, Media Innovation Group).
Monday, 7:30 a.m. @ Microsoft Offices, 1290 Avenue of the Americas 6th Floor

Crain's Most Powerful Women NYC
Yes, Ariana Huffington is in the list. No, she's not number 1. No, I don't know why. Yes, I know she's awesome. Yes, I'm pretty influential. No, I'm not going to call Crain's and ask them to change the list.
Monday, 12 p.m. @ 583 Park Avenue

NJ Tech Meetup 16
If ever there was a reason to cross over the Hudson into that far-off distant exotic land called Jersey, this is it! Featured speaker is Dean Levitt (Chief of culture, MadMimi.com), startups include Artsicle, Peerbelt & Talisman Guidance and special guest is Screenplay Interactive.
Monday, 6:30 p.m. @ Howe Center, Stevens Institute of Technology Bissinger Room, Hoboken, NJ

The Future Of Web Advertising: 4 Startups That Could Change The Marketing Landscape for Online Retailers in a Big Way
Panelists include Lori Hoberman (Chadbourne & Parke), Peg Jackson (Gridley & Co), Erik Nordlander (Google Ventures) and Jeanne Sullivan (Starvest Partners). Featuring startups Album+, Appside, Cognection, Immersive Side and Lemon. Wait-just-a-minute, whats a "Lemon" you say? Why its a "Location Enhanced Mobile Opt-in Network", of course. :)
Tuesday, 5:30 p.m. @ Chadbourne & Parke LLP, 30 Rockefeller Plaza

Skillshare Presents Creative Arts: a party, art show & lesson!
Are you an "intellectually-curious, crafty, artsy doer"? Fo' sure? Alrighty then, you'll like this one. Learn about how u can learn about printing 3D models, cooking colorful food, producing documentaries and more!
Tuesday, 7 p.m. @ Gallery Bar, 120 Orchard Street

NYC Tech Connect: Technology You Can Touch
Ok, I'll be honest. I have no idea what this event is about. BUT it does sound intriguing.
Wednesday, 5:30 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway 4th Floor

Start Something: Why Every Creative Needs To Be An Entrepreneur
Ready to make the leap into startup world but need that one last final push? Thats where this event comes in. Providing inspiration will be Lauren Leto (Founder, Bntr and TextsFromLastNight), Laurel Touby (Founder, Mediabistro), Audacia Ray (Founder, The Red Umbrella Project) and Leigh Ann Tucker (Co-Founder, The Way We See the World).
Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. @ The New School, 65 West 11th Street

Tech Cocktail NYC Mixer Sponsored by After10 and X.commerce
International tech traveler, Frank Gruber, is back with another edition of TechCocktail. The event will be all about ... wait for it ... tech and cocktails of course!
Wednesday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

Network and drink with Time, CNN and Turner executives
Where you enjoy complimentary hors d'oeuvres and sip cocktails as you watch big companies woo startups. (Or is it the other way around?)
Thursday, 6 p.m. @ Time Life building, 1271 Avenue of the Americas 8th floor

VC Finance Update: Growth and Opportunity in the New York Tech Market
Looking for an event where u can corner connect with VCs and tell them all about ur hot lil' startup? You just found it. In the hot seat will be Thatcher Bell (Principal, DFJ Gotham Ventures), Habib Kairouz (Managing Partner, Rho Capital Partners), Warren Lee (General Partner, Canaan Partners), Alan Patricof (Founder & Managing Director, Greycroft) and Benjamin Wolin (CEO & Co-Founder, Everyday Health). Moderated by Greg David (CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and Crains NY).
Thursday, 6 p.m. @ Citibank Center, 601 Lexington Avenue

NY Video September 2011 Meetup
Get your online video on with Douglas Atkin and Jordan Bienenstock (Yackit), Rob Barnett (My Damn Channel), Iliana Grossman and Mark LaRosa (Gust) and Ernest Feiteira (SeeTheJob).
Thursday, 6:30 p.m. @ AOL HQ, 770 Broadway 6th Floor

NY Tech Karaoke
You know what's even more fun than hanging out and drinking with ur fellow tech peeps? Why, singing offkey with them of course!
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ Karaoke Cave, 9 East 13th Street

Bain Capital Ventures Cocktail Hour
Another day. Another awesome networking-schmoozing-drinking-cocktail event. Life is hard, no?
Thursday, 7 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

SMASH Summit 2011
AARRR! You know that sound? It means that super-duper angel, 500 hats-wearing pirate Dave McClure is back in town and this time he comes bearing gifts. A smashing summit, that is. With a terrific speaker lineup including Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Billy Chasen (Turntable.fm), Shiva Rajaraman (Youtube), Steve Cheney (GroupMe), Bre Pettis (MakerBot), Danielle Morrill (Twilio), Chris Maliwat (Gilt Groupe), Dan Porter (OMGPOP), Eric Litman (Medialets) and more. But the person I'm really looking forward to having a "chat" with is LaunchRock's Jameson Detweiler, the guy to blame for all those zillion startup landing pages. ;)
Friday, 9 a.m. @ Microsoft Offices, 1290 6th Avenue Sixth Floor

ER Accelerator Demo Day
Following in the trailblazing footsteps of TechStars and DreamIt comes ER Accelerator's Demo Day. Come hang with ERA honcho Murat Aktihanoglu, directors Charlie Kemper & Jonathan Axelrod and a whole bunch of awesome mentors and startups. Demoing will be BuzzTable, Centzy, LetGive, nabfly, numberFire, Parking Panda, PricingEngine, PublicStuff, Sitesimon and WebThriftStore. Event is by invitation only.
Friday, 9 a.m. @ Undisclosed Location

Getting Covered by the Online Tech Press: How to Get Noticed and Keep Getting Noticed
Ok, so here's the dealio. When blogger extra-ordinaire, Google+ aficianado and tech celeb Robert 'Scobleizer' Scoble (or as I like to call him "The Yoda of Tech Blogging") tells you how to get coverage in the press, you log out of that turntable.fm room, put down ur iPhone 5 prototype and listen. You'll thank me later.
Friday, 5 p.m. @ General Assembly, 902 Broadway 4th Floor

More on the horizon...
YCombinator NYC Meetup on Sep 26 @ Undisclosed Location
Demos and Drinks sponsored by Dealery! on Sep 27 @ Gallery Bar
Digital DUMBO's Fashion Night Out: Official T-Shirt Release Party w Brooklyn Industries & Radballs on Sep 29 @ Dumbo Loft
NYVCA Ingenuity on Oct 5 @ 82 Mercer

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends!

Mr. Scoble.

"Yo, on my way to SF, I met Bob Scoble at a rest stop on I-5," Walter Chen, co-founder of IDoneThis, the side project that went start-up and is now joining AngelPad, Gchatted Betabeat. "He was talking to my cousin about avoiding speed traps and babies," he continued. "And I was like, oh snap, is that Bob Scoble?"

Wait, Robert Scoble hates babies? Betabeat asked.

"Sorry. Avoiding speed traps, and then babies," Mr. Chen corrected. "So I sauntered up to him and I said, I like your t-shirt. It said, 'I love APIs' or something. And I said, I have a start-up, and he said, 'I love to hear about new start-ups.' So I said, let me tell you about IDoneThis. Which I did."

Mr. Scoble tweeted something too: "Yes, I even get pitched startups at rest stops in the middle of nowhere. Met @smalter yesterday who told me about @idonethis Trying it now." Then: "Oh, @kr8tr will love @idonethis -- it asks you to tell it every day what you got done. Makes weekly reports to bosses much easier!"

Mr. Scoble is an influential blogger (Klout score: 84) as well as notoriously good-natured about being pitched. His capacity for trying new apps is bottomless. "Oh, and, yes, I do answer my own cell phone and I do include that number on the Internet for you to use: +1-425-205-1921 and have for several years. I live in Half Moon Bay near the Ritz and would love to meet up with geeks/entrepreneurs if you are in town and I'm available," he writes on his Google profile.

To show you how easy it is to be Quora--or Ask Jeeves, or Facebook Questions, or Google Questions, or Allexperts.com--I’m starting my own question and answer site right here in this very column. If I’m half as lucky as Quora, I should get $150 million.

Why is anyone even paying attention to Quora, at all?

Excellent question. As part of the slavering press frenzy that accompanied Quora’s debut, co-founder Adam D’Angelo told some reporter that he quit Facebook to start Quora because “Q & A is one of those areas on the internet where there are a lot of sites, but no one had come along and built something that was really good yet.” And they still haven’t.

He also said, “We think there’s a lot of knowledge that is still in people’s heads that hasn’t really been written down on the internet in a useful format yet.” Totally.

People think it’s a good idea to care about Quora because question and answer sites are as fashionable right now as rompers were last summer. See, just like the romper,  Q & A sites inexplicably makes a comeback every few years. With Google flooded with spam and SEO nonsense, technophiles are thinking it’d actually be better if we farmed out our question-answering needs to “social networks” of humans. Much in the same way grown women periodically think it’s a good idea to dress themselves in one-piece outfits for two-year-olds, Q & A sites like Quora and Stack Exchange rear their ugly heads now and then.

Plus, just like Hashable, Quora capitalizes on the narcissism and incestuousness of tech start-up culture, generating outsize enthusiasm from a group of people who love nothing more than to hear their opinions and mutual adulations echo around whatever virtual forum happens to be popular at the moment.

That’s it?

Self-promoter Robert Scoble at one point was the site’s No. 1 user, but Quora got upset that he was using it as a personal branding vehicle (an odd objection, considering personal branding is one of the only reasons anyone has any incentive to answer dumb questions on Quora to begin with). Scoble got in a fight with Quora and eventually wrote a passive-aggressive fake mea culpa, and some people who read tech blogs paid attention to that.

Who runs Quora?

Charlie Cheever (my boss’s friend) and Adam D’Angelo, two ex-Facebook guys who decided to jump ship in hopes of making a buck off investors who are going crazy over tech companies. Sound familiar? It should.

How is Quora different from Yahoo! Answers?

Quora is not different from Yahoo! Answers.

How is Quora different from Stack Exchange?

Unlike Stack Exchange, Quora does not make a habit of weeding out poorly formed and illogical questions. (Stack Exchange’s Pokemon questions, for example, are very well thought out and pragmatic, whereas on Quora you get threads like “Who is the sexiest Pokemon?”)

Is Jeeves on Quora?

No, Quora has even less going for it than the ill-fated question and answer engine, because Quora does not even have a cartoon butler for a mascot.

How much is Quora worth?

Somewere between $86 million and $300 million, if you believe the deep-pocketed, glorified lottery players at Benchmark Capital. My valuation is closer to the $0 range, but my opinion doesn’t matter as much as that of venture investors making scattershot investments in hope of cashing in a winning start-up lottery ticket.

Why is this happening?

Mainly because what drives any American bull market is a group of wealthy and self-congratulatory -- but also ignorant -- people wasting their money on fashionable but ultimately worthless investments.

Should we grow up now?

Yes, grow up, you babies.

Despite the fact that it's been trolled by tech journalists for almost a year, Quora's userbase had been growing slowly and quietly until it started to shoot up in the fall.

Uberblogger Robert Scoble finally tried Quoraand wrote a rave review Sunday, and the site was apparently flooded with new users curious to see what all the fuss was about. Existing users noticed a bump in followers as well as a noticeable slowdown as Quora, which posts answers in real-time, struggled to keep up with the traffic.

Quora is unique because it updates in real time, is policed by administrators and tries to verify user identities.

Scoble compares it to blogging, but a more appropriate comparison might be Wikipedia. Quora is going after the questions that people type into Google, such as: Why did the Roman empire fall? Where is the best pizza in New York? What's going to happen to Delicious?

The collection of answers on Quora is edited by administrators and organized by users voting up or down on specific replies, forming a summary that could be a searcher's final destination.

If you're just getting started on Quora, check out our feature Ten Tech-Savvy New Yorkers You Should Follow On Quora.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries