Facebook Launches Q&A Service

Facebook is in the process of rolling out their brand new Q&A service called Questions.  Questions has been in development for months now as we saw with their request for beta testers.  Could this be the future of Facebook?  If Facebook can build up a decent quality database of questions with good answers, it may very likely prove to be a useful alternative to searching Google.  And with 500 million users, there is bound to be some smart people who can provide some decent answers.

Aside from the potential threat to Google, there is a more immediate effect to Yahoo Answers, Mahalo Answers, Quora, and everyone else who is crazed about Q&A type sites.  How will the new Questions portion of the site work?  You will be able to ask a question from a few locations on the site: the Questions tab that appears in the left navigation area, the publisher box which appears at the top of the page, and perhaps, most interestingly, the search box.  When you start typing a question into Facebook’s search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site.  If your question doesn’t show up, or you just want to re-ask the same question, you can do that directly from the search box.

Which brings me to the question: is Facebook becoming a social media monopoly?  I’ll have more on this in a future post, but it is definitely something to think about.  Are they becoming the Wal-Mart of social media?

Screenshots courtesy of TechCrunch.