Facebook has just rolled out a new feature, Questions. Taking a lesson in conversation from old-school social networking site LinkedIn, Facebook now allows users to ask a general question to the public and/or to specific friends within the user's network.
Mashable has pointed out a few useful features for Questions, such as polling, topic exploration and tagging by category.
Asking a question does change the homepage and the bar at the top:
And, as is noted above, all questions are public. No complicated privacy filters here, so your 2:00 a.m. musings from the Mashable Birthday Bash about whether that guy likes you or not might not be the best use of the feature.
Questions also allows the possibility to ask the question to specific friends in your network by tagging:
And the Question tab does appear at the top of your wall for easy asking and tracking of conversations. The most useful feature so far seems to be the ability to tag and track questions by category.
So far, the general reaction seems to be a bit underwhelming, to say the least. Really? Social networking monster Facebook finally caught on to a feature that LinkedIn has had for over a year? The functionality offered by Questions doesn't as yet add any significant value over Facebook's other myriad opportunities for connection.
I vote meh. How about you?