Quick Thoughts on Facebook Questions
This is not a tech blog. I am not a tech pundit.
Having said that, I have a few thoughts on the recent launch of Facebook Questions - the new service that allows users to ask, answer, and search for Questions within Facebook.
If you don't yet have the feature, fret not - Facebook says they've rolled this out to about 3 million people thus far but will deploy as quickly as possible.
Here's a few screenshots:
Facebook Questions - Publisher
Facebook Questions - Page
Thoughts:
Facebook 'Questions' will have a significant impact on the Facebook - and open web - environment for a few reasons. First and foremost, this is yet another push by Facebook to add organization and context to their social ecosystem; eg: 'structured data.' Facebook 'Questions' will provide a relatively simple means, via the Facebook 'Publisher,' for ordinary people to crowdsource inquiry (asking a question), feedback (answers to questions), and discovery (search for Q&A). In other words, structured data + mass-scale + search = a huge win for Facebook. Facebook wins here by common usage and buzz metrics. But Facebook also wins by injecting an equally useful and disruptive product in to the market.
Here's the post from Facebook's blog announcing the launch of Questions:
Today we're introducing Facebook Questions, a beta product that lets you pose questions like these to the Facebook community. With this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics.
And here's Mashable's coverage of Facebook Questions.
We first learned of Facebook’s Q&A feature two months ago, when the company started asking for volunteers to beta test the product. The world’s largest social network even went so far as to promise beta testers a trip to Facebook’s offices to meet with the Q&A team.
If you have any, mm, questions or comments feel free to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, or just visit the contact page. Thanks.
- DHP
Dan Patterson
Mashable has posted a list of five ways Facebook Questions could be improved. These are fairly salient points and it'll be interesting to see how this product iterates.
Dan Patterson
@Andrlik has posted a few very interesting thoughts on the Facebook Questions feature:
I think the real test of a service like this is how useful the answers actually end up being to the end users. FQ is a publicly available feature, covering any topic under the sun, which is a bold move aimed at leveraging the diversity of knowledge available among its 500 million users. This answers-for-anything approach is a tantalizing path for any company that would like to start seriously monetizing based on search, but ultimately it can become more of a weakness than a strength for this type of service.
Tech | tagged Facebook, Facebook Questions, Questions, Structured Data 
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