“Facebook Questions” – The New Approach Into The Search Engine Market???
Facebook has officially launched its “Facebook Questions” on a limited beta test basis–and it could well have some major implications for the World Wide Web.
This may be one of Facebook’s biggest product releases yet, due the the potential to undermine the current search technology employed by Google.
When you ask a question on Facebook, you’re asking it not to a small community or group, but to the 500 million users (As of July 2010) that are on Facebook. All questions are completely public!
This is a far cry from Facebook’s origins as a simple networking service.
“Direct Challenge to the Dominance of Google”….
CNET have reported that “for members to get acquainted with a Facebook feature that’s entirely open to everyone with no option to lock it down, a Facebook representative said that there will be a pop-up window explaining this before any member asks his or her first question.”
Earlier this year, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that the future of the web was one where friends, or what he called “your social graph”, guide you online.
Many interpreted this as a direct challenge to the dominance of Google’s automated search.
How it Will Work…..
Around about 1 percent of Facebook users currently have early beta access to the new “Facebook Questions”, and it will be gradually rolled out to the rest of Facebook’s 500-million-plus active users after that.
Any Facebook user can ask a question from a new “question dashboard,” the profile “publisher” that lets members update their statuses and add photos, or through the search box.
They can tag their questions with category keywords, too, and those tags will eventually be used to fill up an aggregate “questions” tab on relevant Community Pages on Facebook.
Of particular interest is the fact that a brand’s “fan page” on Facebook will be able to ask questions too, as well as respond to other questions, providing an opportunity for some “conversational” marketing and impromptu market research.
The new feature allows people to quiz the entire Facebook community by clicking on the “Ask Question” button.
Security Issue?
Facebook has been plagued with privacy and security issues these past few months, and one thing that people will have to keep in mind is that the Facebook questions are open 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.
Users can also create polls, add photos to questions and tag them with a specific topic.
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.
