Los Angeles — With competition reaching a flash-point in the Q&A space from Quora and LinkedIn Answers, social media site Facebook on Thursday said that it has refurbished its Questions service and transformed it into a succinct, sleek, poll-taking machine, making brevity the soul of wisdom.
After an initial test run last year with a small group of beta users, now Facebook is making an official go with its Q&A application that consolidates it tightly into the broader Facebook experience, making it far less of an isolated feature.
The modifications are mainly designed to make Questions more streamlined and better integrated into the Facebook network. The service is now geared towards enabling people to quickly poll friends and get practical recommendations, like suggestions for a good local restaurant, rather than seeking long-form answers to factual questions.
Facebook Questions are designed to be short and to the point.
There is nothing Quora-like about this feature: Facebook does not want your personal fulminations about anything. Instead the application works like an addition to the user status and lets you ask your network their opinion and force them to vote for an answer or provide their own.
More precisely, the new Facebook Questions facilitates short, poll-like answers in addition to long-form responses, and also links directly to relevant items in Facebook’s directory of “fan pages.” That is something that is very relevant if you are asking a question about, say, movie recommendations or a good restaurant to visit.
“We wanted to make questions easier and faster to answer. With the updated Questions you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response,” writes Facebook staffer Adrian Graham.
Graham elaborated that during testing, it became clear that people were mainly using questions to ask for opinions, and finding friends and acquaintances, rather than experts, as the best sources of advice. With that in mind, speeding up the process was key.
The new ‘dashboard’ for Facebook Questions, emphasizing quick, poll-like answers for social recommendations. (Image Courtesy: Facebook)
The methodology here is that Facebook Questions is where you would go to get your friends’ insight and recommendations, Graham explained. “People can submit queries that are open-ended or in poll format through the Question tab in the News Feed. When a friend sees the question in their stream and clicks on it, a pop-up appears, allowing them to answer — either endorsing an existing reply or entering a new one. In the polling format, typing in an additional choice opens up a drop-down menu of matching Facebook Pages and Places.”
Moreover, Questions can be asked of a large group of people (including the world, apparently) but the answers will be refined to include the user’s friends, first. Other opinions can be viewed using the “others” option, Facebook said.
Questions will begin rolling out to all Facebook users today and available to all account holders soon.