The Q&A site Stack Overflow which received $6 Million funding in May has crossed the 10 million unique monthly visit mark – certainly an amazing achievement. The site differs from other Q&A sites by not only offering a 1 stop question shop but by segregating questions into communities. There are 34 different sites with topics from cooking to IT security with more in the pipeline. This is something which the competitors such as Quora lack.
Starting with 3 full-time developers, the company now has 24 new recruits and founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood even hired one of the power users, Marc Gravell! The new talent has encouraged the sites development and the Stack Exchange has been built. This gives users the ability to suggest new communities and crowd sources the directions that Stack Overflow goes in. By developing popular topics the Stack Exchange also guarantees the necessary critical mass needed for such communities.
Traffic is soaring and Spolsky attributes this to the band of programmer following the site. Problems are often queried in Google and results from Stack Overflow are returned. This has also spawned a viral movement not only amongst the tech-savvy but from other demographics around the web. This can only be a good thing as diversity results in more content and more traffic. As page views increase, more diverse and perhaps niche communities can develop leading to even more useful crowd sourced content. Other new features have included an interactive chat applet but next steps might be more social interaction.
