I was thinking about this today as I stood in the East Room of the White House (#humblebrag). Why was I there? To see Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey moderate a Q&A session with President Obama. Yes, the President of the United States was answering questions that were coming entirely from Twitter, the formerly stupid service that was a joke, remember?

First, it was a lame joke to begin with. Second, Hoot Suite has a board of directors? That’s part of the April Fool’s Day joke, right? Third, don’t abuse the trust of your email marketing list – that’s just reckless and dumb. Welcome to opt-out hell.

Dorsey may belong to Gen X, but he is a throwback to a kind of heartland idealism we associate with earlier generations. His optimism flows mostly from a St. Louis-bred spirit about our common life, democracy, and human potential. He claims his inventions all aim at the same goal: a society that works more efficiently and humanely. “My role as an observer and as a technologist,” he says as he strides through a San Francisco rainstorm, holding a big blue umbrella, “is to show everything that’s happening in the world in real time and get us to that data immediately, so we can change our lives even faster, with better knowledge.”

The leaps in valuation are dizzying. At its current on-paper price, Facebook’s value is somewhere between that of Ford ($55bn) and Visa ($63bn). But that’s still less than a third of Google’s value, Facebook’s arch-rival in the battle for domination on the internet.

This is as good a read as you’ll find about the current state of start-ups.

“The network isn’t crazy about you tweeting. They’re not sure that’s cool,” O’Brien recalls being told. His response was simple: “Tell them I would be thrilled if they shut down my Twitter account. I’d love it if that got out. You think PR’s been bad up till now? Wait till you take away my Twitter account.” Today O’Brien laughs at the old-media disconnect of that moment: He is approaching 2.5 million followers.

Thankfully, it looks like Twitter isn’t going to comply.

Let me see if I have this right: Quora is, in a nutshell, a VC-backed version of Yahoo Answers (without the bigots and jerks answering questions) with the ability to share your answers to user-submitted softball questions with your friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter.

Sound about right?

There’s been a full-court press of Quora love in the first four days of 2011 from some fairly influential social media thought leaders. This of course has led to a gold rush of narcissistic tweets of answers to questions published all up and down my Twitter feed.

I’m not making this up – I even saw a declaration from someone earlier today that “in 2011, we won’t Google things, we’ll Quora them!”

I’m gonna go out of my way to bust that myth straight-on and raise a few questions along the way.

First, Quora is a bit of a boutique site that, until mid-2010, was virtually unknown. In 2011, Quora picked up the secret council of social media experts™ endorsement, helping traffic explode and user-generated content exponentially grow.

I think there are two questions facing Quora right now that could pose as roadblocks to real success: 1) can you convince baby boomers and millenials – the real wild cards – to change their established information hunter-gatherer methodologies? and 2) can you sustain the level of quality content while catering to everyone’s desire to be a subject matter expert?

As of 2011 – and hell, 2012 – I say no. Not when Quora threads like this are heavily voted and promoted by the dreaded early adopters who are hell-bent on proving that, while they missed out on the early days of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, they won’t miss out on being an “expert” on “the next big thing!”

Here is a snippet of the heavily promoted Quora thread I referenced above:

Take 30 minutes and figure out what the ecosystem here is like. Don’t just assume that you’ll figure it out as you go along. This isn’t a free-for-all where you try to prove how smart and informed you are! It isn’t a social network either, despite the fact that you’ll have part of your social graph here.

How many casual users do you think are going to be scared off by reading something like that? Moreover, who has 30 minutes nowadays to dedicate to learning what an ecosystem is like on a new site? Compare that to say, Reddit – it only takes a few minutes of a user’s time to figure out Reddiqitte.

Second, in the always important SEO/visibility world, how will Quora compete with similar topic-driven, user-generated content sites like Squidoo, Mahalo and Yahoo Answers? Unless Google’s algorithm du jour assigns heavier weight to social media frequency/reach, questions like Who is the best member of the Wu-Tang Clan?* won’t crack page 5 or 6: a relative dead zone.

Finally, can we all please stop comparing Quora to Twitter, or calling it the next Twitter? Just because it’s growing fast (on the backs of other social networks & social graphs, natch) doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s some white-hot, bulletproof internet property. It could be, sure, but right now, the hype is deafening for a company that’s only been through one round of VC funding.

Ahem.

WIKILEAKS is not ANONYMOUS. So when MSNBC’s @BreakingNews account tweets

… it kind of shows a severe lack of understanding as to what’s going on. Wikileaks does not employ or encourage “hacktivists”; rather, this is a byproduct of individuals operating within Anonymous and through Operation Payback.

It bears repeating: WIKILEAKS is not in any way, shape or form affiliated with ANONYMOUS.

The DDoS attacks that are originating from Anonymous/Operation Payback are only tangentially connected to Wikileaks, in that it’s a cause that Anonymous/Operation Payback strongly supports. This is not a hard concept, but yet I’m seeing media fail at it left and right.

(If you’re really curious about Anonymous, head over to 4chan, where you can get an unfiltered view of the internet’s seedy underbelly in action.)