14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is finally ready to roll out its Questions feature to everyone, after being launched last summer to a few testers. You'd think that after all of this time, the feature would be quite polished, but the Questions Facebook is launching now is not the same product it first revealed in July at all.
It's a completely redesigned feature that changes its scope and the way it works. In a way, Facebook Questions is more like a poll app than Yahoo Answers, but this approach may actually be more suited and more successful on the social network.
"Questions originated as people began using Facebook in a new and unexpected way. People would update their status with a question, and their friends would answer in the comments," Facebook's Adrian Graham wrote.
"Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone," he said.
"We wanted to make questions easier and faster to answer. With the updated Questions you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response. This makes it easy for many more people to respond to you. It also helps us show you the most popular responses," he explained.
With the new Questions, users create a new question and can fill out several responses, giving their friends several choices to select from. The questions only go out to your friends at first. They can choose from the options provided or add their own answers.
As more of your friends vote, the question becomes visible to their friends, so if it's a particularly popular one it may go viral. Most of the times though, it will stay within the users' circle of friends.
Questions is being rolled out to everyone this time, so it should become available soon enough. It remains to be seen if this version will prove more popular than the one that Facebook tested last year.