My Latest Tweet
Follow @FirasAlkhaffaf
Facebook has officially launched Facebook Questions to selected groups of people and will roll out to more users over time. Basically how it works is a user post a query and the answer will from the Facebook community.
For years, questions have been asked to trusted people around us within a community and Facebook Questions is going to bring this feature into their website. It’s similar to Mahalo, Yahoo! Answers, Twitter and Quora, in ways that users can post questions and other users can answer them. This can easily be done by clicking the “Ask Question” button on the homepage. Facebook Questions is also available on your friends’ profiles just like you would post on their walls.
A preview of Facebook Questions (I borrowed this image from Mashable.)
Facebook Questions Features
Can you imagine the online potential of this? According to Mashable several features are going to be included in Questions. One cool feature is going to be able to post photos, for instance of a bird whose species is unknown and then get the answer via the community. Another feature is going to able to have your question answered using polls e.g. which fruit tastes: apple or orange?.
Facebook Questions way of browsing is going to be through Tagging and Topic Exploration. Tagging will let users tag their questions so others can find them and Topic Exploration will let users browse either by specific topic or all topics.
Facebook Questions Topic Exploration (Mashable is so kind for letting me borrow these screenshots)
Another thing that Facebook Questions will have is a following feature, which lets you follow a question for updates and new answers. This will let users expand their knowledge base by getting notifications when new answers are made available.
One major change will be the homepage as a new bar is added at the top where you can choose to update your status, ask a question, add photos, or post a link.
Facebook Questions is not for Advertising
This is one thing Facebook has made clear; it’s not for advertising. Although Facebook Page users can answer questions, it won’t be used for advertising purposes, but rather building a quality resource for users. However, this is going to allow Facebook to get a further insight into their users. It will help them to do more targeted marketing and advertising using their Advertising services for instance, as they will be collecting more data about their users. Can you imagine someone asking a question, and an advert pops up on the right hand side with the “answer”? Interesting stuff, huh?
This new Q&A platform is going to be open to the public, so don’t be asking some questions you don’t want the world to see.
Facebook are taking many steps to expand themselves. About a month ago, I posted an article about Facebook bringing search on their website and providing tools for SEO. These moves are very interesting and I can see Facebook becoming more dominant online, ecpecially with a user base of 500 millions.
So what do you think? Let me know what your thoughts are on Facebook Questions by posting your comments below.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Facebook introducing Ask and Answer from my perspective is quite a natural progression and is surely going to help its strategy of being the de facto data store.
I wud surely use the facebook Q&A more than others as i already have a established network who wud be more than willing to answer and collaborate…
I wud be interested to understand the reward mechanism which FB is goin to give for Best Answers or the max viewed Q&A thread !!
That’s interesting! I wll have a try later…