Facebook has revealed a new feature called Facebook Questions. It’s currently in beta and allows users to pose queries and get them answered by other Facebook users who are in the know. It’ll be handy feature for Facebook fans when it launches for everyone but it’s also a clever more by Facebook to get its fingers further into social search and compete with Google (which recently snapped up its own questions service) and other providers of online answers. Read on for answers to your questions about Facebook questions…
Facebook director of product management, Blake Ross, announced Facebook Questions on the company’s blog. He says it’ll give you “a broader set of answers” than just slapping a question in an ordinary status update. Posts to Facebook Questions will be visible to all Facebook users and tagged so people with particular interests can find queries related to their area of expertise.
A follow button under Facebook Questions posts will allow you to keep track of answers to that query. As well as being thrown out to the entire Facebook population and indexed on search engines, your Facebook Questions show up on your wall so friends and friends of friends can wade in with their wisdom.
Facebook Questions also gives you the option of posting a picture (one of the examples Ross offers up is identifying a mysterious flower in your back garden) or a poll.
Ross indicates in his blog that it may take some time for Facebook Questions to be opened to everyone. The beta is currently being tested by around 50,000 users.
Once Facebook opens Facebook Questions to the 500m+ accounts currently registered on the social network, it’ll gain a rich new source of data on what interests users. That will help it to improve how it sells advertising but it’ll also give it a leg up in social search to compete with services like Ask, Wiki Answers, Yahoo Answers and Aardvark which Google gobbled up earlier this year.
Aardvark asks users to field questions from strangers on topics they know about via IM or its iPhone app. So far Google hasn’t made much of its acquisition but the arrival of Facebook Questions may kick it into gear perhaps even as part of the mysterious Google Me.
Let us know what you make of Facebook Questions. Does the idea of harnessing the wisdom of the Facebook crowd appeal to you? And if you’re one of the lucky 50,000 testing the new feature, we’d love to hear what you make of it in comments.
Out TBC | £free | Facebook
