Much ado about Quora

With the New Year comes a whole new wave of exciting possibilities for social media in 2011. We've had the first marriage proposal on deal-of-the-day website Groupon, Facebook is overtaking Google as the most visited web page and with newcomers such as Instagr.am, FourSquare and WhatsApp there's a steady stream of engaging ways to interact with our online network.

One of the most interesting topics trending on Twitter right now is Quora, the new questions and answers service on the block. The site is estimated to have half a million registered users and is getting a huge amount of media buzz thanks to $11 million in Series A funding, great SEO capabilities, some heavy-hitting early adopters and glowing recommendations from some major players in the social media industry.

What appeals to me about Quora is that users have to give their full name so there's no hiding behind an online moniker. The site is easy to navigate and has a 'follow' option similar to Facebook making it easy to customize and highly personal. Quality is key to the Quora experience and with a straighforward ranking system the most popular answers to most viewed questions are clear.

With half a million registered users already signed up, the challenge for Quora is maintaining this quality as it expands. Right now there are none of the spam type responses you see with Yahoo Answers which, coincidentally, is still the most popular Q&A website around by a long shot. Now, just for kicks, I'm off ask Quora just what it has to say about that.