Facebook Questions Has Died A Quiet Death

Has anyone seen Facebook Questions lately?

Oh sure, you’ve seen questions on Facebook. And you’ve probably asked questions on facebook — the “Ask Question” option is alive and well on the status box, as you can see above.

But Facebook Questions, the separate application that launched just over two years ago is nowhere to be found.

When Facebook Questions launched in its limited beta, it was accessible at facebook.com/?sk=questions. When it rolled out to all Facebook users in March 2011, the URL changed to facebook.com/questions. That’s where you could go to see and search for questions to answer, all organized into topics. Here’s a screenshot from our original coverage on Search Engine Land:

Today, both of those URLs redirect to the News Feed, although the second one shows only poll questions. There’s no “Questions” app listed in my left-side menu, and it also doesn’t appear in my full Apps list. Facebook Questions is nowhere to be found in the Facebook Apps section of the App Center. As best I can tell, it’s gone.

When it disappeared is anyone’s guess. I wasn’t a regular user, but I don’t recall seeing it since the switch to Timeline.

We’ve emailed Facebook’s communications team multiple times over the past month asking what happened to Facebook Questions, but the only reply has been “We’re looking into it.” The Facebook Blog has been quiet, too — there are only two posts in the Questions topic: the post announcing Questions in July 2010, and its full rollout in March 2011.

When Facebook announced Questions two years ago, Facebook itself had 500 million users. There was some thought that such an enormous, built-in community could position Facebook to surpass Yahoo Answers and all other sites in the Q&A space. It apparently never caught on to that degree, and now it looks like Facebook Questions has died a quiet death.

Postscript, October 30: Facebook has finally removed the “Ask Question” option from the status update text box, as discussed in our new article: Facebook Questions Is Finally Dead.