What I learned about social media from Quora after four seconds

Quora is the big new thing. Everyone is talking about it and in about three hours it'll be worth about $10 trillion. But what I learned after about four seconds is that not enough people really understands where social media is going and this new site will only illustrate the confusion.

Quora is like a real time Wikipedia for people who want to know stuff. Post a question and someone who knows what they are talking about may be following such questions and may answer it for you. It's a great idea and it will be huge this year, no doubt.

Being an experimentalist in social media I obviously began by following all threads social media/PR/marketing/viral/Twitter/Facebook/blah blah blah. Straight off the bat you see hundreds of questions and answers linked to these subjects. And four seconds in I saw that many people do not really understands what is going on. We have been given these awesome tools that can do so much but we don't know how we can use them. But everyone wants to use them to make loads of money. But they don't know how. But they know they can. Argh. It'd be enough to drive one to drink if it weren't before 10am.

Most questions ask where is it going, what is it doing, how do I get on board - and the answers differ wildly. Don't get me wrong, they are some great ideas and some smart people on there but social media theory and direction seems to be a lot of people wandering around in the dark.

So will Quora help us pool our thoughts and help bring it all together? You better start following some questions to find out....

While Quora will add to the wonderful multi-colored mush that is global social media I don't think it is going to help us answer the big questions just yet - it's only created more confusion.