TechCrunch says that Hegeman confirmed the move on his Facebook Timeline (in a private post). In the post, Hegeman says that he’ll be joining the engineering team at Quora in “a few weeks.” Here’s the post in full:

Today is my last day at Facebook. I feel extremely fortunate to have spent five and a half years working with and learning from such an exceptional group of people. In particular, I want to thank Mark for building this incredible company and my managers Yishan, Kang-Xing, Greg, and Boz for all of the mentorship and opportunities that they have given me. The decision to leave wasn’t easy, but I’m very proud of all that the ads team has accomplished and I’m extremely confident that the team is in good hands. I look forward to seeing the great work I know they will continue to do. Looking forward, I’m excited to be joining the engineering team at Quora in a few weeks. I’m grateful to Adam for this opportunity to work with him and the rest of the team at Quora who are building an incredible product. I can’t wait to get started.

Hegeman has been an engineer on Facebook’s ads team since 2007. Before that, he attended Stanford.

Back in December, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo announced that the company had a new mission. It was a growth mission, to shake up the usual Q&A format that Quora is known for and work to “share and grow the world’s knowledge.” Earlier this year, Quora launched blogs and a rich text editor.

One time, we learned that psychos keep him from voting in elections. Another time, we found out what he thinks about people who think he has the power to shut down Wikipedia. Recently, we learned that he will probably buy Google Glass.

Today, we see Wales having some Chuck Norris humor fun.

Read Quote of Jimmy Wales’ answer to Jimmy Wales: Is Jimmy Wales the Chuck Norris of Quora? on Quora

You can’t find this stuff on Wikipedia.

The official company line is that usage has declined. Google is also a busy company with a lot of projects going on at once. Shutting down Reader lets them refocus the team on something else. One former product manager for Google Reader suggests the Reader team will be sent to work on Google+.

Brian Shih, Former Google Reader Product Manager, recently responded to a thread on Quora asking why Google Reader was being shut down. He says that the common explanation for Google Reader’s demise – lack of monetization options – probably didn’t play a role in its sunsetting. Instead, it’s all on Google+ and the company wanting to move more resources to the social network:

Let’s be clear that this has nothing to do with revenue vs operating costs. Reader never made money directly (though you could maybe attribute some of Feedburner and AdSense for Feeds usage to it), and it wasn’t the goal of the product.

Reader has been fighting for approval/survival at Google since long before I was a PM for the product. I’m pretty sure Reader was threatened with de-staffing at least three times before it actually happened. It was often for some reason related to social:

2008 – let’s pull the team off to build OpenSocial
2009 – let’s pull the team off to build Buzz
2010 – let’s pull the team off to build Google+

It turns out they decided to kill it anyway in 2010, even though most of the engineers opted against joining G+. Ironically, I think the reason Google always wanted to pull the Reader team off to build these other social products was that the Reader team actually understood social (and tried a lot of experiments over the years that informed the larger social features at the company). Reader’s social features also evolved very organically in response to users, instead of being designed top-down like some of Google’s other efforts.

He says the real death knell came when the company decided to move Reader’s social features to Google+ in an effort to encourage more sharing via its social network. Since then, he assumes that Reader usage has dropped as more people moved to Google+.

So with dwindling usefulness to G+, (likely) dwindling or flattening usage due to being in maintenance, and Google’s big drive to focus in the last couple of years, what choice was there but to kill the product?

Shih notes that all of this is purely conjecture as he left Google in 2011. The reasoning behind the shutdown could be as simple as Google says it is – Reader doesn’t have many users anymore. Still, it’s interesting to see the internal politics regarding Google’s products, and how they decide to allocate resources.

[h/t: The Next Web]

Read Quote of Jimmy Wales’s answer to Hypothetical Questions: Can Jimmy Wales shut down Wikipedia at his will? on Quora

Very stupid.

Update: Since this was first posted, Wales has decided to change his wording a bit:

Read Quote of Jimmy Wales’s answer to Hypothetical Questions: Can Jimmy Wales shut down Wikipedia at his will? on Quora

One of the comments in the thread, from Marcus Geduld, said:

Mr Wales, I have tremendous respect for you and your work, but I’m saddened and surprised to see the founder of an encyclopedia — and educator — write, “This is a very stupid question.”

Not everyone understands that wikipedia is a corporation, and not everyone understands how corporations work. People who don’t understand how certain things work can often learn by asking questions. When we respond with “That’s a stupid question,” we send them a message that says “Stop asking questions!” And that response likely to resonate all the more loudly if it comes from someone in your position.

Another comment suggested that Wales was responsible for the famous SOPA blackout, to which he responded, “I didn’t do it. There was a community vote, support from the CEO, etc. I do not have (nor want!) sole authority for anything like that.”

“More and more, people read and write on Quora while on-the-go. Many people also love using tablets, making a unique Quora experience for tablets one of our most popular requests,” the company says in a blog post.

The design makes use of a split panel to take advantage of landscape view:

The app also comes with improves search functionality, and makes use of the service’s new blogs feature. The feature debuted with support for iOS. They didn’t waste too much time getting it out to the important Android market as well.

The updated Android app also comes with some speed and performance enhancements.

You can find it in Google Play here.

Today, Quora made a pair of announcements, including the launch of new blogs, and that of a rich text editor.

Like its Q&A, blog posts will be categorized by relevant topics (there are over 300,000 of them). These topics are, of course, followed by users, so these people will have a chance to read your blog posts.

“This is different than other platforms where your audience is dependent on how many people follow you personally,” says Quora’s Kah Keng Tay. “In addition, because of the way that Quora works (i.e., feed, search, the topic system, other distribution channels), your old posts and answers remain discoverable and re-discoverable as Quora’s audience grows.”

More on the blogs here.

The new rich-text editor is for the iPhone as part of a new update the company is launching. More on that here.

Quora says its active writers average 30,000+ monthly views and 350,000+ estimated annual views. Its most active writers average 90,000+ monthly views and 1+ million estimated annual views.

Though as a LinkedIn user, I have yet to receive an email on this, Mashable is reporting that LinkedIn users are getting emails from the company about the service’s demise. The publication shares this statement from the company:

“As of Jan. 31, LinkedIn Answers will be retired from LinkedIn. We will be focusing our efforts on the development of new and more engaging ways to share and discuss professional topics across LinkedIn. In the meantime, members can still pose questions and facilitate professional discussions through other popular LinkedIn channels including LinkedIn Polls, Groups, or status update.”

Q&A site Quora (though it’s looking to expand its own offerings beyond Q&A) added a new LinkedIn connectivity feature last month, enabling users to directly share their Quora contributions on their LinkedIn profiles.

“Quora is a place where people share a wide range of knowledge and experience with others, and many users have already shared stories about professional opportunities they’ve received due to their contributions on the site,” a spokesperson for Quora told WebProNews. “Now, with the use of LinkedIn’s new profile, Quora is making it easier to share your answers with your professional network to demonstrate your expertise and to give a fuller picture of your professional biography and identity.”

LinkedIn announced last week that it has surpassed 200 million members.

In a blog post, D’Angelo says, “The vast majority of human knowledge is still not on the internet. Most of it is trapped in the form of experience in people’s heads, or buried in books and papers that only experts can access. As a consequence most people don’t have the knowledge they should, and don’t have the time, connections, or skills to get to the knowledge they would have in an ideal world.”

“The internet was supposed to allow anyone to set up a web page and share their knowledge with the world,” he says. “But in practice it’s too difficult and takes too long and almost no one does it. Blogs are easy to start, but unless the author is famous, it takes years to build a following. More than a billion people use the internet yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it.”

“Quora aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatically increase the total amount of knowledge available to the world,” he continues. “As we grow, we will be able to provide larger and larger audiences to writers, cover more and more topics, and have greater and greater impact on the world.”

D’Angelo goes on to say that Quora hopes to become an “internet-scale Library of Alexandria,” where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know.

“Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge,” he says. “Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up.”

Sounds like big changes are on the horizon for Quora.

From the beginning, Quora has captured a unique user base of thoughtful entrepreneurs, engineers and tech industry “experts”. It doesn’t get an enormous amount of media coverage, but it is a place where a lot of smart and interesting people answer a lot of questions.

It says a lot that even Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales frequents the site. When you’re looking to share and grow the world’s knowledge, that’s a pretty strong endorsement.

“Quora is a place where people share a wide range of knowledge and experience with others, and many users have already shared stories about professional opportunities they’ve received due to their contributions on the site,” a spokesperson for Quora tells WebProNews. “Now, with the use of LinkedIn’s new profile, Quora is making it easier to share your answers with your professional network to demonstrate your expertise and to give a fuller picture of your professional biography and identity.”

“Answering questions on Quora demonstrates your knowledge as well as other qualities — helpfulness, empathy, a sense of humor, and confidence,” says Quora’s Richard Henry in a blog post. “And Quora’s use of real names makes LinkedIn a natural partner for both of our communities; on both sites, your real-world reputation is tied to what you post.”

To enable LinkedIn sharing from Quora, just connect your accounts from the Quora settings page.

“The new app is better and faster with a new UI that takes advantage of the iPhone 5, more accessible and faster search, and easier sharing,” a spokesperson for Quora tells WebProNews.

“The user interface is simpler and more beautiful than ever, and best of all, it gets out of the way of the content that you want to read,” Richard Henry writes on the Quora blog. “The search bar scrolls cleanly off the screen when you don’t need it, and there’s more space for reading questions, answers, and content.”

Search is three times faster and more accessible, according to the company. There is a new search input at the top, which lets you find things on Quora.

Also new to the app are: improved sharing through Facebook, email, Quora Inbox, Text Message, etc., continuous scrolling in the feed, the ability to answer and follow questions anonymously, and some bug fixes. The app icon has also been updated.

The company says it is growing its mobile team, and that this app (along with the recently released Android app) only represents the beginning of its vision for mobile.