WIRED:Does imitating Facebook get you another Facebook, or just a tiny orbiting satellite of a giant?

WHEN GOOGLE was first launched, it was one of a kind. In a world of search engines set upon making money out of their popularity by drowning their front pages with advertisements, entertainment “portal” links and other distractions, Google just had a single entry and two buttons.

Instead of cheap tricks, its engineers emphasised speed, algorithmic smarts and simple functionality. More than a decade later, it is hard to convey how radical an idea this was.

Partly that’s because Google’s approach has been copied by dozens of companies and it is partly because Google’s own engineers have gone on to inject “the Google way” into the rest of Silicon Valley, and by extension the world. The lessons those engineers learned at Google are the rules they apply at any other job, because those rules worked so well.

Now we’re beginning to see the same effect occur from this decade’s internet giant: Facebook. That doesn’t mean we’re going to see Facebook clones, just as no one from Google would think to attempt to compete with Google. Instead, we’ll see companies that replicate the internal philosophy and attitude of Facebook – even if they look very different on the outside.

The poster child for the Facebook future is Quora. Quora is based on an age-old internet idea: it’s a site for posing and answering questions. It was founded by Facebook’s first chief technology officer and high-school buddy of Mark Zuckerberg, Adam D’Angelo, in 2009 – and it exudes the Facebook model.

Like Facebook, it remained restricted to selected users for much of its early life. Those selected users, at first, often composed of friends still at Facebook. Facebook’s social graph (its list of your friends) are used to steer you to questions you might like and answers your colleagues have enjoyed.

Rather than the free-for-all that Google encourages, its questions and answers were ruthlessly groomed and pruned – questions are even edited by human administrators for spelling, grammar and punctuation.

It’s a child of the new century. Unlike the wildflower fields of far Web, as explored by Google, it is a carefully curated glasshouse of hothouse flowers, tended almost by hand.

It seems incredible that such a system could possibly scale, but you can’t honestly say to anyone who came out of Facebook that they don’t know how to scale: they scaled a college album into 500 million users.

Right now, Quora is far more boutique. It is much beloved by its users but there only seems to be about about 300,000 of them (that’s an estimate from December; Quora itself won’t release user figures).

The site feels even smaller than that and most of its users that I know felt that it was a well-kept secret, whose growing popularity would spoil its exclusive smartness.

Frankly, it’s not surprising that it felt small: those carefully managed questions are clustered around questions about the tech industry, Silicon Valley, entrepreneuralism and, yes, what it’s like to work at Facebook. When I tried to burst out of my little bubble (and I should admit that perhaps Quora’s profound knowledge of my friends’ interests meant that it was carefully shepherding me back into my box), I found little outside it.

“How to cook a turkey” brought two answers; the questions on “Zoos” were either ridiculously specific (“Why doesn’t the bald eagle at the San Francisco zoo fly?”), or just ridiculous (“Where can I find a zebra?”).

Still, that attention from key Silicon Valley audiences can only help Quora build up the fighting fund it needs to develop the service. Quora gets far more attention than other start-ups. It was turning away funding from the start and received an $11 million investment for a valuation of $86 million in March.

In many ways, Facebook’s success is a testament to the danger of imitating the patterns of the past. There are dozens of Google’s rules that the company broke – not least, that it never revealed its data to Google’s own search index.

Quora’s challenge is to work out which of the new rules of Facebook it should copy and which are unique to its progenitor company.

In August, Quora broke Facebook’s self- containment rule and opened up the site’s question and answers to the Google indexers. The world knew the exact date, because Adam d’Angelo took time to answer a Quora users’ question on the topic and pre-announce it.

Does imitating Facebook get you another Facebook, or just a tiny orbiting satellite of a giant? Microsoft has plenty of mini-Microsofts around Washington state, but they run on the sufferance of the bigger company. By definition, they will never match it for size. Quora doesn’t have social graph data of its own: it takes it from Twitter and Facbeook.

Trying out the Facebook DNA on the wider internet might not pan out, because you’re competing like-with-like. Facebook launched its own “Facebook Questions” service in July; Google and others also have QA sites of their own.

Quora gets the big bucks and the headlines, but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be as big as its background – but you don’t have to be the next big thing to survive. Sometimes being the next little thing is enough to allow a company survive; and encourage investors to back the next company to follow the new Facebook rulebook.