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Facebook Rolling Out 'Questions' for Some Users' Homepages

by Caleb Johnson on April 14, 2010 at 04:50 PM

Facebook is testing a new 'Questions' product with some users that could become direct competition to services like Quora, Aardvark and Yahoo! Answers. The product would bring real-time Q&A to the site (and ruffle some feathers, since Quora was started by former Facebook employees). Yesterday, All Facebook reported that the questions box was appearing on some users' homepages. Last night, as All Facebook reported, Blake Ross, the Director of Product at Facebook, gave a lengthy response on Quora about the new product.

"Given that Facebook is a social utility, our focus is on delivering practical value to users who need answers quickly from the people around them (whether socially or spatially)," Ross wrote on Quora.

Ross says Facebook Questions will build on the old Facebook polls product, which was rolled out and then killed. You'll enter a question into the box and receive instant feedback from users across the social-networking site. Of course, Ross downplayed any rivalry, saying all these services were intended for different purposes. He says the decision to build Facebook Questions was a matter of having the resources to do it, not because the company wanted to 'kill' other companies.

Nice try, but we're not buying it. Whether intentional or not, every time Facebook rolls out a new facet that competes with a specialized company, be it MySpace or Twitter, it's effectively going in for the kill. [From: All Facebook]

Tags: Aardvark, BreakingNews, facebook, facebook questions, FacebookQuestions, questions, quora, rivalry, SocialNetworking, top, YahooAnswers

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