Today Facebook has released its question and answer service to around 1% of its userbase, or 5 million people. The product is a direct hit to all question and answer startups, Yahoo Answers, and in a small way, Google.
The product is 100% public, not partially as is the case with other Facebook services. You can ask a question from your status, making it a very simple product to begin using.
All questions are searchable, meaning that Facebook, starting now, is building a giant repository of information that people want and need. Will there be significant chaff? Of course, and poorly spelled chaff at that, but over the next months Facebook is going to answer tens of millions of questions, disrupting large swaths of the internet. The numbers that are to be considered with this service make it important from day one, which is today.
Will Quora, Mahalo, and the other companies that focus heavily on solving individual questions be able to survive this hit? From our previous coverage, the outlook is rather bleak. You just can’t compete against someone who owns the world’s eyes and offers them an integrated solution.
Are you going to use Facebook Questions? And even more, can you see it yet?
Not visible in Greece yet..
Huge scope! Should check if its already available in my account.
The phrase “Your question will be visible to everyone” should more explicitly say that it means everyone, including the everyone that’s not in someone’s friend list. The kind of people that read this blog can figure that out, but there are those that can’t and will later complain about it after asking a question about the best way to get back at their boss and getting fired over it.
Certainly agree that Facebook Questions is unquestionably going to be a formidable new force in the community Q&A and social search space. But just as not every Web giant that rolls out a feature or service in a given space necessarily sends all the others in that space packing (see Google with Wave and to some degree Buzz, perhaps) I think we’d all agree it’s safe to say that the word isn’t out yet as to whether Facebook Questions will clear the field. There are also other dimensions to social search and Q&A, such as what we’re doing at Replyz, that doesn’t compete directly with other Q&A and social search sites, but rather serves as an open ask-and-reply engine that pulls in questions and replies from all over the Web, such as Twitter, and enables people to reply to them.
where the hell IS it? i cannot find this ‘questions’ thing!