Facebook Questions is the latest in a long line of question-and-answer services online but, as Danny Sullivan mentioned in his news article earlier, it’s the only one with a community of 500 million users behind it. For comparison’s sake, Yahoo Answers, the recognized leader in the Q&A space, announced in late 2009 that it had reached 200 million users worldwide. It remains to be seen what percentage of Facebook members will use Questions, but it’s obvious that the service could surpass Yahoo Answers in due time. |
| How to Ask Facebook Questions |
I typed my first question into the box above, and before adding it to the site, Facebook showed me this pop-up window that serves as an extra warning. |
After clicking on “Ask Question” to confirm things, the question is on the site and available to be answered by any other user. Facebook automatically “tags” the question based on the words you’ve used. In my case, it placed the question in the “Seattle” topic (correctly) and a “Years” topic (say what?). |
Fortunately, you can edit the topics/tags — more on that in a moment. I’ve asked a question about a flower and need to show what I’m talking about so others can help. With each question, you have three options that only show up after the initial question has been posted: |
| Add photo Add poll options |
When you’re done, adding or changing the topics is easy, but a bit hard to find. It’s not right below the question as one of the edit links. On the far right of the question page is a section called “Related Topics.” (see screenshot above) It shows the current topics for your question and has an “Edit” link — that’s where you can remove or add new topics. |
Sharing Questions with Friends |
Once you begin using Facebook Questions, you’ll get a separate “Questions” tab on your profile, too. (see above) That tab should show all your activity, with options to see just your questions or just your answers … but as of this afternoon during my testing, the tab wasn’t working. |
Answering Facebook Questions |
(SEOs will notice, too, that there’s an encouragement to provide links to sources that you used to find your answer. Yahoo Answers encourages this, too, but sorry … just like on Yahoo Answers, the link is no-followed. Yes, I became the first Facebook Questions spammer just so I could test this for you.) |
On the right of every answer, Facebook has a checkmark and an X button — these are used to mark a reply as Helpful or Not Helpful. As those buttons are used, the replies will move up or down the page. The highest-ranked answers appear at the top and others follow in descending order. |
One of the big questions is if Facebook Questions can avoid (or survive) some of the things that plague Yahoo Answers and some other Q&A sites: spam, uninteresting chit-chat posed as a question, and so forth. If it does, it will probably be due to the size of Facebook’s user base and the depth of the personal connections that many users have made. Facebook is building a Q&A service around an existing and popular social graph; the competition, to a large degree, is trying to add social features on top of a Q&A service. Read more at searchengineland.com |
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