Quora Debuts Embedded Quotes to Better Court Publishers

Quora announced a new function on Monday that allows third-party publishers to more easily highlight Quora content on outside sites.

With “Embedded Quotes,” publishers can now click an embed link from underneath Quora user entries and take a snippet of code to insert in their sites. It’s an easier, faster option for outsiders, and presents a fairly attractive bit of Quora content for third-party platforms to display on their sites (check out the screenshot here).

It’s much akin to Twitter’s similar pitch for “embedded tweets” last year; again, a streamlined way of sticking content inside third-party sites. Quora’s pitch positions it as a better way to expand its users’ authorial presence outside of Quora.com.

But it’s really about executing a growth-stage tactic: Expanding Quora’s presence outside of its own site. Make it easier for publishers to feature your content on their sites and they’ll do your product evangelizing for you.

It’s also a much-needed bit of good publicity after the company debuted its “Views” product earlier this month, a move by Quora that put on display all user reading activity for others to see, much to the chagrin of Web privacy wonks. Still another growth-stage move, Views was made to foster activity inside the site itself. Unfortunately, pushing everyone into Views by default left a bad taste in the mouths of many.

Embedded Quotes is a simpler — and much less controversial — way of achieving growth. Now we’ll see if publishers take the new feature up.