14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has reached a stage where it can pursue any product or feature it wants and enter pretty much any market as a strong competitor. Google is one of the few other companies in this position and Facebook has only recently become so powerful. It’s not wasting any time, though, and it is looking at various opportunities. One of these is the Q&A space, which, despite seeming saturated, is getting bigger every day. Facebook is now testing a Q&A feature that would leverage a user’s social graph to provide answers to “logistical and recommendation” features.
The feature was first spotted by the AllFacebook blog, but Facebook itself later weighed in to shed some light on the issue. In its current incarnation, the “Questions“ feature would add other users’ questions on top of the ads in the right sidebar. A user would be able to provide an answer, ask for a new question or dismiss it altogether.
It’s unclear who will get what questions, but it can be assumed that the social graph will be leveraged, for example only getting questions from friends of friends. Of course, a user could also be targeted based on their expertise in a particular field or subject. The initial report pitted the feature against established Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers or the hyped startup Quora.
Interestingly enough, Blake Ross, Facebook’s director of product, who is involved directly with the Questions prototype, used Quora itself to add a few more details on Facebook’s plans. He says that Quora, which is a more traditional Q&A site, is not really a competitor to the way Facebook plans to go about this. He adds that the Q&A market is big enough to have several competitors working at different angles. He also insists that a Q&A feature has been in the works at Facebook, at least as an idea, for a few years now.
However, he, indirectly, indicates an existing service that is a lot closer to Aardvark, the social Q&A service acquired by Google a couple of months ago. And the similarities are pretty striking. Aardvark also leverages a user’s social graph, spread across several social network and online services, including Facebook, to direct the right questions to the people most likely to have a relevant answer.