Facebook to release new ‘Yahoo Answers’ called Facebook Questions
By Wilson • Jul 29th, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Facebook
Facebook now seems to be getting greedy with the Internet pie from which it holds a slice of 500 million subscribers. Zuckerberg & Co. are looking to harness the wisdom of crowds from the Facebook community they possess through launching Facebook Questions. Like Yahoo Answers, users will type questions into forums which will be answered by the greater Facebook community. It sounds all very simple and easy, but for some it’s an old idea and they’re not expecting that much success.
Why now?
The reasoning behind Facebook Questions according to the press release is that, ‘Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day. What new music should I listen to? Where’s the best sushi place in town? How do I learn to play the piano?” But now Facebook is taking it one step further and instead of leaving a users pool of friends to provide the answers to the questions which they may ask daily, users can now ask the greater Facebook community.
Facebook believes that, ‘With this new application, you can get a broader set of answers and learn valuable information from people knowledgeable on a range of topics’, which is true. The new ‘Yahoo Answers’ from Facebook is currently in the testing phase and only a few users can use the service.
How it will work
- Photo: Stock.Xchng
When Facebook Questions is fully functional, Facebook users will be able to use the service through typing their questions into a new the ‘Ask Question’ box. Also in improving the response times and getting more knowledgeable answers, tagging the questions with specific words such as cycling or hiking will have Facebook draw its answers from the pool of Facebook users who have listed those activities as one of their interests or so on.
In theory it is evident how this new features is different from users asking questions in their status updates. However how Zuckerberg will convince users to really take advantage of the feature is another question all together.
Tags for this article: Facebook, Facebook Questions, social network, social networking
