Facebook Questions has actually been around since last summer, but it was somewhat lost in the mix of Yahoo Answers, Yelp, and now Quora. But the developers at the social networking giant has revamped Questions to focus less on categorical knowledge, and more on making it quick and easy for users to gather their friends’ opinions.
“We noticed that people were frequently asking for opinions (‘what are your favorite restaurants in New York?’) or hoping to learn about their friends (‘what was your favorite movie as a kid, something you watched over and over?’),” writes Questions product manager Adrian Graham. “For most of these questions, experts weren’t going to be the best source for advice. The answers to these questions are meaningful or interesting because you know your friends and your friends know you.”
What Facebook Questions also brings to the table is the ability to construct multiple choice questions and polls. So if you were trying to organise a night out or a trip somewhere, you could give your friends the viable options and allow them to say which ones they would prefer, and view this as a nice graphic. This will be an awful lot easier that posting a status and hoping that enough people reply to give you an idea of what the general opinion amongst your friends is.
Whether or not this new feature will take off and rival the likes of Yahoo Answers, Yelp and Quora remains to be seen, but it does seem like a very logical way of canvassing the opinions of those that matter to you, and not the whole world. Facebook says that the new feature will be “available to everyone soon.”