Leena Rao writes on TechCrunch: “Mint.com Socializes Personal Finance advice With New Q&A Feature“. Congrats Mint – Q&A is indeed a very basic human need, and I am sure your Mint’s users welcome this addition to the wonderful toolset you’re already providing them with.

Leena goes on:

It makes total sense for Mint to launch an establish portal for financial advice; especially considering the success of current social Q&A sites like Quora.

Whow.

I respect Quora. It’s a formidable team that created an impressive Q&A service, intelligent and feature-rich. I’ve been using Quora for a few months now, and have even sent out Quora invites to several people.

I am using Quora because I can see Quora becoming a potential formidable competition to our own Yedda.com if it ever opens up to the public.

However (and this may surprise you if you feed only on TechCrunch assessments) Quora is NOT open to the public yet.

Quora is in private-alpha invite-only mode, with a relatively small number of well-chosen users using it, most of them from the Silicon Valley tech community.

My guess is that Quora will get acquired by Facebook for $60-$100M, because it has Facebook Acquisition written all over it. I am guessing it will be a worthwhile acquisition for Facebook, unlike other recent SV-hype-fueled acquisitions in this space which make a lot less sense to me. I am also guessing it will happen before it actually opens up to the public.

Once this happens, we’ll be able to define Quora as a financial and professional success for its founders and investors. In the hands of Facebook, it may even become an actual success in terms of number of users and amount of content (did anyone say “Community Pages“?). If it’s a wild success, it may get to the point where it is an actual competition for Yahoo Answers. Before getting to that point, it will need to grow by several orders of magnitude, bypassing FunAdvice and Yedda and AnswerBag and Mahalo Answers and WikiAnswers and several other successful players in the Q&A space. It may very well do that. When it does, we’ll be able to say “considering the success of current Social Q&A sites like Quora”.

I also respect TechCrunch. Scratch that. I have a deep emotional link to TechCrunch. TechCrunch is where we received our initial coverage when we launched Yedda. Michael himself was the one who patiently waited while we worked out the bugs in the initial beta registration form, as well as the one who first reported on the Yedda acquisition by AOL. TechCrunch is where I get most of the tech news from. Which is why I would love to see TechCrunch resisting the friendly pull of the SV inner circle and its self-feeding hype-chamber, and creating content that is based on facts.