Facebook Relaunches Q&A Service

With competition heating up in the Q&A space from Quora and LinkedIn Answers, Facebook has revamped its Questions service to make it faster and easier to use. You didn't know Facebook even had its own Q&A offering?

If not, that's because since July, the company has only been testing it with a small group of beta users. Even so, it gained little traction. Facebook began rolling out the updated version today with the same test users, but the service is also available for other Facebook members to try on an opt-in basis.

The changes are mainly designed to make Questions more streamlined and better integrated into the Facebook network. The service is now geared toward allowing people to quickly poll friends and get practical recommendations, like suggestions for a good local restaurant, rather than seeking long-form answers to factual questions.

In a blog post today, project manager Adrian Graham explained that during testing, it became clear that people were mainly using questions to ask for opinions, and finding friends and acquaintances, rather than experts, as the best sources of advice. With that in mind, speeding up the process was key.

"With the updated Questions, you can agree with an existing answer with a single click, or you can add a different response. This makes it easy for many more people to respond to you. It also helps us show you the most popular responses," wrote Graham.

The redesign also lets users cast a wider net, so when friends answer one of your questions, their friends can answer it also. Plus, answers can be linked to things on a Facebook brand page or Facebook Place page, which could provide another avenue for marketers to generate traffic from a user's social graph.

People can submit queries that are open-ended or in poll format through the Question tab in the News Feed. When a friend sees the question in their stream and clicks on it, a pop-up appears, allowing them to answer -- either endorsing an existing reply or entering a new one. In the polling format, typing in an additional choice opens up a drop-down menu of matching Facebook Pages and Places.

One caveat: "Questions will not appear on Pages that happen to be answer choices, and there will be no Insights analytics for the product, limiting its potential as a marketing tool. Pages may ask and answer questions, though, leading them to appear on their wall," according to the Inside Facebook blog.

Answers that get the most endorsements from friends will rank highest. Users are notified when friends respond to their questions. "The redesign brings Questions back within the core functionality of Facebook, rather tacking it on as a stodgy, high-minded knowledge base," noted Inside Facebook. Facebook said it plans to roll out Questions more widely soon.