What Do You Want to Know About Your Facebook Friends?

Back in April AllFacebook.com reported that Facebook was testing a question feature oddly similar to the product Quora (which was founded by ex Facebook employees). Today it went live for some markets and a flurry of questions began flooding my newsfeed. Right off the bat I can see this as a useful tool for myself for writing articles and for engaging my Facebook communities. My biggest beef so far is that it doesn't let you choose specific friend groups to respond to questions. Targeted questions would also be extremely useful to brands. Plus, when I pose a question I don't want to have to worry about my creepy stalkers answering it.

According to Mashable, photo questions are/will be possible as well as polling but I can't seem to create those yet (perhaps that feature isn't available yet?). I can see the photo feature as being a fun way to ask friends which outfit I should wear to an event. I also love the ability it gives you to follow/unfollow certain questions. I wonder if they'll roll out this feature in the future for comment threads. I hate it when I comment on a photo of one of my popular friends and then I get notifications for months from her fans commenting on it after me. The ability to turn off those notifications would be fantastic.

I posed the question What do you think of Facebook Questions? to some of my friends and here's what they think:

• Ben Parr, Co-Editor of Mashable.com: "Facebook Questions is going to be very popular and very useful for Facebook's users. Users will complain about it at first, but it's going to be huge."
• Chris Heuer, Founder of Social Media Club: "Facebook questions will easily become a dominant player in the QA space, spelling trouble for existing sites like Yahoo! Answers. More and more, everyday tasks that we do naturally are being enabled within Facebook, which according to my former business partner Mark Adams is the modern version of Outlook for the average person's view of their digital lives. While this is a promising new feature, I would still like to see them do more to make photo sharing easier and more valuable and fix other issues with core functionality like email."
• Nick O'Neill, Founder AllFacebook.com: "A great first attempt at building a product with utility that will increase overall engagement."
• Dan Patterson, Digital Platform Manager, ABC News Radio: "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."

What do you think about Facebook Questions?

Leora Israel
		About the author:
		A veteran in the social media space, Leora has worked as a professional blogger, editor, online strategist, and more. You'll often find her in front and behind the camera as a nightlife photographer and web personality. She has also spoken at such conferences as SXSW and Blog World Expo.
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