At first, when I saw the new Facebook Questions feature I thought of Formspring. In case you missed it – Formspring allowed random people to ask you questions. You could reply to those questions and the whole thing could be “public”. Nice idea in theory until the “MySpace’rs” and Spammers found it and it then became a mess of senseless questions and answers. Good idea gone bad.
I could see the new Questions on Facebook quickly turning from something of value into just another App creating noise.
I wanted to get a better glimpse into how and found a great question posed by my friend Julie. She simply asked Where you favorite vacation spot was. Just so you know, she’s in Kona, living the dream, so I guess for her it’s anywhere outside her front door. But I digress.
I started answering her question by posing a place of my own. As I was typing I noticed that Facebook was giving me drop down suggestions. In my example I’m typing Detroit and you can see there are PAGES being suggested.
Naturally I wanted to see where this could go so I typed in my own Page and sure enough Facebook allowed me to set that as my favorite place to Vacation in poor Julie’s Poll.
That opens the door not just for more noise but for actual SPAM! Page owners of the SPAM variety can search for polls and then simply put their page as an answer. Would that work? Just as soon as I answered the question for Julie – now my friends had it in their stream. I have almost 4,000 friends.
And for everyone who also answers a question – they’ll be exposing the same poll to their sphere. See where I’m going with this? An unscrupulous Page Owner could be answering questions all over Facebook linking back to their page!
How would they find these questions and polls? Easy! Just go here: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=questions That pulls up all the questions from all your friends into one location! SPAM AWAY!
As for how many people want to actually vacation on my Page instead of a beautiful Tropical Island… I think my page is ahead. Yes, we found out it’s also possible to hijack a Poll (even for fun – sorry Julie)
Want to see this poll in action? (and vote for my Page) just go to http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=question&id=1965960514362
Related articles
- Facebook turns Questions into a Poll (sfgate.com)
- Facebook Launches Questions (mindjumpers.com)
- How to use Facebook Questions (simplehelp.net)
- How to Use the New Facebook Questions (lockergnome.com)
- Facebook Questions Revamped (webpronews.com)
Mike Mueller
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and wants a really small one). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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