Facebook Revamps Questions so People Might Just Use It

Facebook has redesigned its Questions feature, in what seems to be an admission that the original version wasnt getting much traction. The new version launched today, and will gradually be introduced to all users over the next few months. The original feature tried to connect people by letting them ask questions with any Facebook user even a complete stranger who shared an interest in the topic. The redesign takes the complete opposite approach and is aimed at making it easy for friends to answer questions. The move seems designed in part to set the Facebook feature apart from a number of popular Q&A services such as Quora.

The original version of Questions was rolled out to a small group of users last year Facebook project manager Adrian Graham wouldnt say exactly how many, but said that it was a fairly small percentage of the social networks user base. Those beta testers will be the first to get the upgrade, although others will be able to opt-in to the new version through the Facebook Questions page, and anyone who answers a question posted by a friend will also be invited to join the new service.

Graham said that when Questions first launched, the focus was on connecting you to people you didnt know who might share an interest in the topic of the question. So if you asked about hotels in San Francisco, the site would show the question to users who had expressed an interest in that by incl! uding tr avel or hotels or San Francisco on their profiles, favorites and fan pages. That made it seem pretty similar to what was being offered by sites like Quora which was founded by former Facebook CTO Adam DAngelo and, at one point, there appeared to be some bad blood between the two sites.

Graham says the new version of Questions takes the complete opposite approach, and tries to make it easy for friends to answer questions from other friends, regardless of whether they have already expressed an interest in that topic. In addition to posting a simple answer, Facebook shows what other people in a persons social network have answered, and allows users to simply pick one of those responses and add their vote to it.

The new version of Questions is also designed to take advantage of the viral nature of the giant social network by making it easier for users to share questions and answers with their social graph something that the original iteration didnt do, Graham admitted. This version is much more similar to the way questions commonly get answered, he said. You ask a friend and then they say Oh, I know someone who knows the answer to that and they pass it on. Theres also a poll-style function that lets you ask a question and provide some sample answers for people to vote on.

The changes appear to be designed in part to set Facebooks feature apart from Quora, but also from Twitter which many people use as a source of answers to common questions about where to eat or what to buy. There are lots of places on the Internet where you can get answers fro! m people you dont know, said Graham, but there arent many places where you can quickly get answers from your friends.

If anything, the changes make it obvious that the focus of the original version of Questions was a mistake, because it didnt take advantage of the single most powerful thing that Facebook has going for it: an intimate connection to your entire social graph.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Colin Kinner

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