Facebook launches Questions feature

Facebook has rolled out its new Questions feature to a fraction of its 500 million users. Questions allows you to ask questions to the Facebook community and receive answers from friends or friends of friends.

Facebook Questions is only available to 1 percent of Facebok members, but a company blog post says this application is being rolled out in the coming days. Questions lets you pose questions to the Facebook community. Where can I get the best tacos in Manhattan? Does anyone know if Simon and Garfunkel are touring North America? How do you make ice cream? As the blog post states: "To ask a question to the community, just click the 'Ask Question' button at the top of the homepage. You can also ask questions about your friends from their profiles, similarly to how you would post on their Walls." Asking a question gives you the option to add a poll or a photo. You might want to attach a photo of something you are curious about and ask, "What kind of bird is this?" Or you might want to run a poll finding out how many of your friends liked the movie Inception. Facebook encourages you to tag questions with keywords. If you're asking about a camera, tag the question with "photography." Curious which NBA player has the best free-throw percentage of all-time? Slot the question in "Sports." Facebook addresses privacy concerns relating to this new feature: "Keep in mind that all questions and answers posted using the Questions application are public and visible 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." Facebook Questions goes up against some strong players in the ask-a-question-get-an-answer field. There's Yahoo Answers, Ask.com and Quora. As CNET writes, this market is lucrative for advertisers hoping to gather more info about their customers:

...when Facebook Questions is a mature product, Facebook will have an even bigger trove of searchable public information and opportunities for ad targeting--something that it will want on its side as it positions itself against Twitter's swarm of real-time chatter and conversation and Google's choice spot as where you go when you want to, well, find something.