14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has started rolling out its anticipated but so far unconfirmed questions and answers product. Facebook Questions, as the new service is called, allows users to post questions on any topic they want and get answers from their friends and other Facebook users. The service has been in private beta for a few months and it is now being rolled out, gradually, to everyone.
“Facebook Questions helps you tap into the collective knowledge of the more than 500 million people on Facebook. For example, if you're vacationing in Costa Rica and want to know the best places to surf, you can use Facebook Questions to get answers from nearby surfing enthusiasts,” Blake Ross, director of product management at Facebook, announced.
“Because questions will also appear to your friends and their friends, you'll receive answers that are more personalized to you. To ask a question to the community, just click the ‘Ask Question’ button at the top of the homepage. You can also ask questions about your friends from their profiles, similarly to how you would post on their Walls,” he added.
Q&A sites are nothing new online. Sites like Yahoo Answers and Mahalo have proven very popular. Recently, Quora, a Q&A site still in private beta, has been getting a lot of praise. But Facebook’s service operates a lot more like Aardvark, a product acquired by Google not so long ago, in that it taps into your social graph to get the most adequate people to answer your questions. Considering its massive size, Facebook may be in the best position to dominate the market.
You can ask questions in pretty much the same way you post status updates. The questions are public by default and accessible to everyone online. All of the questions, as well as the answers will be linked to your Facebook account and your real name. This has its benefits, it provides accountability for the answers, but it also means that users will avoid certain questions. Facebook Questions will be rolled out initially to about three to five million people.