Social Networking turned a new leaf with the launch of Facebook. Facebook caused a paradigm shift in how Social networking sites were perceived and took the idea further to bring lots of sticky additions to its platform. From sticky games and tons of interactive applications, Facebook has almost up gobbled up its much older peer- Orkut.
The recent Open Graph project is a testimony to the fact that Facebook is much more than helping people discover peers/friends. Even with all the issues concerning privacy, Open Graph experiment seems to have picked up and people are now sharing stuff with the click of a button. No wonder industry experts are touting Facebook as a threat to Google what with Facebook’s explosive traffic and innovative advertisement platform
Apparently, Facebook is quietly building its very own version of Yahoo Answers or for that matter, Google’s recent acquisition Aardvark. Facebook is keeping it under wraps and is planning to leverage its huge user base to build a crowd sourced Question-Answer platform
In an appeal to interested users to become beta testers, Facebook is trying build a huge data depository of rich information with the contribution from its user base itself. As mentioned on it’s official page.
We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.
As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product
The incentive for early users being an opportunity to be seen as an expert and also a trip to Facebook headquarters. The opportunities for Facebook are however endless
An extension/alternative to organic search :
A user generated database of relevant questions and answers about anything and everything under the sun. Throw in the Open Graph feature and the platform becomes a recommendation engine. With millions of active users, the relevancy and freshness of the platform become a bonus
Opportunities for Individuals/SME’s To Showcase Their Expertise :
Individuals and even SME’s could answer relevant questions and showcase subject matter expertise. This could very well create job opportunities for individuals and leads for businesses
The opportunities could be endless but a lot will depend on the execution. I have not been an avid user of Yahoo Answers but whatever little I have used it, the quality of answers is not satisfactory. Whether Facebook is able to maintain quality of information in a totally crowd sourced platform is something that will determine the success of the product
What do you think of this development from Facebook? Are they only trying to create the next big alternative to Yahoo Answers or there is more to the development than is visible?