A new year, a new shiny toy to play with in the shape of Quora, the social question and answer service.

Since Tuesday, Twitter – and Quora – has exploded with hype, counter-hype, naysayers and people somewhere in-between trying to work out if this is the next big thing in social media.

There’s a few interesting points to be made around the bubbles around these services, which I’ll come to in a bit, but to answer the Quora question, my initial thoughts are probably not, but it’s an interesting and potentially very useful site that could gain a reasonable amount of traction.