Facebook Gets Into the Q&A Game

Facebook will use the power of its enormous crowd to answer questions posed by individual members, but whether the results will be more reliable than any of the other services already doing more or less the same thing is a big unknown. For Facebook, the quality of answers might not matter very much, though. The advertising opportunities are sure to be plentiful either way.

Facebook has jumped into the online Q&A space -- typified, up until now, by such websites as Quora, Aardvark, Hunch, Ask.com, and Yahoo Answers -- with Facebook Questions, a beta feature that can be viewed by all Facebook users.

The service is being released on a rolling basis, with reportedly some three million to five million people able to use it now.

This is how it works: Click on the "Ask Question" feature, which can be found in the status bar. Type in a query -- say, "What is the best pizza restaurant in Adams Morgan?" The question becomes visible to all Facebook users. People posing questions can use a tag, in this case, "Washington, D.C.," to direct them to those best able to provide answers. The question goes out to users who share that topic's interest, as well as to the questioner's network.

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