Facebook Questions debuted in the summer of 2010, was in response to Quora, a question and answer based social network, allowing users to create a poll asking their friends and other Facebook users anything they want. Who’s the best Backstreet Boy? What’s the best pizza place in town? Or Whatever. Initially, the product saw some buzz but soon became a mostly forgotten feature.
According to CNET, a Facebook representative stated that the social media company is pulling Questions in order to “focus on other things.” The company did not elaborate on what those things might be, but it is probably pretty safe to assume that includes search. Although Questions will still be available for Groups and Pages, since it provides a constructive tool that is specifically useful to those kinds of Facebook activity.
More so, users will still have access to old Questions they have asked via the Activity Feed. The Questions option still currently shows up on normal user accounts, but expect it to disappear in the next couple of days. “Questions will still be available for Groups and on Pages – which is really where they belong anyways (if anywhere). As a page owner, users can still select ‘Question’ from the ‘Offer, Event +’ tab in the update box.”
However, unlike Quora, which Questions was expected to squash when it was launched, users simply choose a pre-defined answer. While the occasional poll appears on Facebook asking some silly question, the product was never particularly popular.
Unfortunately, the interface was a bit clunky and even after making it simpler and targeted more towards friends, the product never gained any popularity. And then Facebook did the big revamp in the Spring of 2011. They said the new Questions was all about your friends and finding useful information via polls. The new product allowed users to designate multiple choice answers or allow for long-form responses. When that happened, for a while it saw a decent amount of questions floated via news feed. And then, just like before, went haywire.
For now, they seem to be focusing more on renovating search in particular, which has been a pretty hot topic for the company in the past few months. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that Facebook is “pretty uniquely positioned to answer a lot of questions people have.” It is sort of “friend mining” – as CNET pointed out last month – extracting specific answers to a question by mining the immensely data-rich social graph.
On the other hand, Facebook has been pretty modest about launching an actual search product, but it has acknowledged it has a team working on it. Such an offering could be like Quora on steroids. The site, now gearing up their Ad platform, search continues to be an untapped opportunity and potential goldmine.