Why?
Facebook has debuted a new service that makes it easier for users to get useful answers to the questions they ask.
Unsurprisingly called Facebook Questions, the service is designed to let users collect answers from their friends after posing a question such as: Where should I go for dinner?
In a blog post, Adrian Graham, a project manager for Questions, said the idea for the service came when people started using Facebook in an unexpected way...asking friends questions.
"People would update their status with a question, and their friends would answer in the comments. We saw this and began thinking about how we could make this interaction more useful. Over the summer, we began testing Questions with a small group of people, and today we are beginning to roll it out to everyone," he said.
The idea is that unlike some Q&A services, people are after their friends' opinions or want to learn more about their networking contacts so experts' answers were not too important.
"The answers to these questions are meaningful or interesting because you know your friends and your friends know you," said Graham.
Now the Questions service makes it easy for users to agree with an existing answer or add a different response to a question, encouraging more people to respond as well as helping the question-asker easily see the most popular responses.
The idea is that Questions will also allow Facebook users to ‘cast a wider net' as when their friends answer a question their friends can answer it too, although this surely must conform to a user's security settings.
Graham said: "For more unusual questions, you can get advice from a broader group of people, but to keep it most relevant we filter the answers to show you first what your friends think. You can see more responses by clicking "others" within the question."
Interested users can try out the service but it is due to be properly rolled out ‘soon'.
TechCrunch reported that Facebook has tried to make a success of Questions before, taking on services like Yahoo! Answers and Quora, but only made the service available to a small number of users.
Now however, it is believed that the service will no longer be a threat to Quora and users will not pose questions to the whole of Facebook and it is more socially focused towards friend groups. A question apparently pops up as a poll in friends' social feeds, inviting them to take part.
The old version apparently let users browse by topic but now that has gone and only questions posed by friends will pop up in a feed, demonstrating that Facebook has seemingly abandoned plans to amass a big centre of knowledge, like Quora.
