Facebook ‘Questions’ in Limited Public Beta

Facebook has been for some time testing Q&A with a small number of users from its 500-million strong community. Now the site is opening it up a bit more. Danny Sullivan took the briefing and has a short write-up:

How can you use Facebook Questions? Facebook is randomly selecting a small number of its users. If you’re picked, you’ll see a notification that you can now use the service. Over time, Facebook says it will expand the service to more and more users.

I have talked extensively to people at Facebook about the service but haven’t had a chance to use it myself. Execution is key here.

Danny Sullivan was told:

• All questions are made public to anyone, not just to your friends
• Questions can be tagged with keyword to associate them with topics
• You can browse questions asked by topic

There are now what seem like a bajillion players in this segment, including Google (Aardvark), Yahoo, Ask, JustAnswer, ChaCha, kgb, Replyz, MerchantCircle, among a few others. But given Facebook’s reach and visibility, it’s new “Questions” could become a break-out product.

Some of the questions will undoubtedly be about local places and businesses, seeking recommendations. Together with the “Like” database this creates a parallel dataset of really interesting and potentially useful local recommendations.

Questions about the product:

• How will questions be routed? Who gets to answer? (see update below)
• How will quality surface? Quality is one of the issues with Yahoo Answers
• How useful and accessible will the archive be?

Typically with these kinds of products there’s a big SEO angle. I would imagine that will be true here too.

What do you think? Will this be a significant offering or a sideshow for the social network?

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Update: The Facebook blog post offers some additional detail:

After you ask a question, you have the option of adding a photo or a poll. Want to know what type of flower is growing in your back yard? Take a photo and attach it to the question. Wondering which video game system is better for your 8 year-old cousin: Nintendo Wii or XBox? Make a poll.

Keep in mind that all questions and answers posted using the Questions application are public and visible to everyone on the Internet. If you only want to ask a question to your friends or a specific group of people, you can still pose it as a status update on your profile targeted to those people.

To help us show your question to the most relevant people and ensure the best answers, you can tag it with a specific topic. For instance, if you have a question about what type of camera you should buy, you could tag it with “Photography.” If you want to find the best bike routes in the area, you might tag it with “Cycling.”

The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag, as well as to your friends and friends of friends.

Update 2: Matt McGee has written a nice, “hands on” piece in which he comes to the conclusion that if it can avoid mediocrity and spam Questions will be a pretty compelling service.