"Calling Twitter and Branch and Quora “media companies” is a new and novel thing, but it’s accurate. These companies *have* learned from traditional media companies. And, I suspect, media companies are going to start learning from them.
Quora is the bridge between Twitter and old media, here. Which part of the company’s rationale for encouraging people to embed posts doesn’t apply to the New York Times? Why, if the posts are going to be quoted anyway, wouldn’t the New Yorker or the Atlantic or CNN or, I don’t know, BuzzFeed, benefit from providing an embed code for its text, which keeps both the publication’s name and logo, the author’s byline, and perhaps even an ad? Traditional media companies might start to ask: Why is Quora doing more to to ensure credit for its unpaid contributors than we are for our expensive content? Why are we being less assertive about ads, which are our lifeblood, than Quora, which is sitting on a cloud of VC money. Copy-pasted text doesn’t make ad money, and simple link doesn’t always capture people. An embed does. “I think you’ll see traditional media companies start to look more like Twitter, and Twitter start to look like traditional media companies,” says [Josh Miller, cofounder of free-floating discussion platform Branch]. And I think he’s right."