The arrangement and intention of Facebook’s Questions product were considerably changed not so long ago. The redesigned tool concentrates on quickly polling friends and getting recommendations instead of previous long-form answers and following topics.
Firstly the product gets at disposal of English language users however it will become internationally available only over the next few weeks later. The access to the new Questions product is open for beta tester group that possessed the old product. Moreover, the redesigned tool is available to those who opt in at www.facebook.com/questions and also everyone who’s specifically asked a question.
The old Question product didn’t enjoy wide popularity and was used only be 0.05% of Facebook users which is equivalent of 250 000 people.
According to the project manager Adrian Graham the new Questions product is similar to questioning in our real life. It takes the right for user’s privacy into account and brings the conversation into sight only to the friends of those who asked the question or answered it. Graham underlined that users have private messages and privacy-controlled status updates for querying a restricted amount of people.
Thanks to the new Question product Facebook account holders receive an opportunity to get useful recommendations proved by their friends or to give their own recommendations of things represented by a Facebook Page.
How Questions Works?
Choose Questions in the News Feed. You are empowered to ask questions of different types: free response or pre-set answer choices provided in poll format. By the way, there is a possibility to add answer choices in the latter option. Any of your friends are enabled to see your questions however you can choose a particular friend and address your issue exceptionally to him.
A pop-up comes into sight after clicking on a news feed story about a Question. The appearing pop-up enables your friends to response without losing their place in the feed. Besides, users can both provide a new answer and endorse an existing one instead of the previous possibility to upvote or downvote answers. A type-ahead drop-down menu of matching Pages and Places appears while typing in a new poll choice. Furthermore, the questions can be answered any times user has a desire to respond to them.
The answer that gained the most endorsements appears at the top of the answer page. The order also of the other responses corresponds with their popularity, the more endorsed the more above.
Users raised the question receives all the responses to it in form of notifications. They also will be notified of all the answers to any questions they are eager to follow.
Opinions Over Facts
The old Question product showed that people prefer to receive recommendation and answers to their questions from their friends and don’t long for a scientific response. Moreover, the old product confirmed that users are more likely to answer the questions without writing anything but want to respond using only one click. These and some other preferences of the audience have been taken into consideration while the new Question product has being developed.
By the way, services like Quora are already providing factual questions and answer sites for the small concerned audience. However the renewed product made by Facebook address the much larger need for a mainstream casual, social questions and answers experience, but with authenticated identity to save its high standard.