The increased attention on Quora reminds us of two New York companies: one old, one new.

Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, recently pivoted to a Q&A strategy after losing the search wars. Jeeves was fired in 2006 (although you can actually dress him up on uk.ask.com) and Ask.com scrambled around for a while trying to find its niche. 

Tadpole startup Kommons launched in September as an add-on to Twitter that "amplifies your questions." The idea is that you can ask @KanyeWest anything you want on Twitter, but he's probably going to ignore you. Kommons lets users back a question directed at a specific person.

For example, someone might ask "Hey @KanyeWest, what kind of toothbrush do you have?" And then hundreds or thousands of people would follow the question and Kanye would realize that his fans really care about what kind of toothbrush he uses, and upload a picture of it to Twitter.

The questions are usually more confrontational than that, though. Founder Cody Brown, who also founded the news site NYU Local, keeps fielding the same question: How is Kommons different from Quora?

"Kommons is different than Quora, it's not either/or," he wrote on Twitter. "Directed questions versus recreational questions."

"My answer from 3 months ago," he tweeted later, linking back to his answer on Kommons the first time he was asked that question. 

"We're different than Quora," he told @jcstearns. "I wrote about this a few months ago."

Being constantly compared to another company must be annoying. But Quora is a well-resourced Silicon Valley startup started by former Facebook employees and valued at upwards of $80 million. Brown should be flattered.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

But the death of InstantAction, a gaming firm acquired by IAC for $50 million back in 2007, highlights a more troubling trend for Barry Diller, whose reputation as a new media mogul has suffered in recent years.

InstantAction, formerly GarageGames, was a platform aimed at helping developers create socially networked games for the web, a market which has seen explosive growth in the past few years, including several enormous acquistions and the birth of a new billion dollar business, Zynga.

The fact that InstantAction was unable to even survive in this industry, much less capture signigicant market share, is a troubling sign for IAC.

Competing with Google just didn't make sense, Ask.com President Doug Leeds told Bloomberg. 

"It's become this huge juggernaut of a company that we really thought we could compete against by innovating. We did a great job of holding our market share but it wasn't enough to grow the way IAC had hoped we would grow when it bought us."

Ask.com joins Microsoft, which recently integrated its Bing search engine with Facebook, in betting social is the best route for competing with Google. 

Hopefully this means that Barry Diller understands Ask.com has a business model, just not the one he paid $1.85 billion for back in 2005.