Given that Quora is filled with a ton of great content and practically every other online publication is quoting the answers on the site, I figured that it would be a good idea to start posting Quora questions of the day, focused specifically on Facebook. Today’s question relates to the tension between Facebook and Quora, which has become magnified since the Questions product was rolled out yesterday.



As many users noticed yesterday, Facebook Questions was experiencing a lot of bugs when it first launched. The company quickly began fixing the issues, however it didn’t go unnoticed. One observant Quora user posted a question asking why the product was so buggy considering that it was a high profile product and had been in testing for so long. Yishan Wong, an ex-Facebook employee, posted a response which flattered the founders of Quora, Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever.

And that’s it for our first Quora Facebook question of the day!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives visited Washington, D.C. this week, the latest moves to fend of possible legislation around privacy and online advertising.

National politicians have begun paying more attention to online business in the last couple of years, with Facebook getting special attention around issues like privacy policy changes.

Zuckerberg’s first official trip to Capitol Hill included private meetings with politicians, including with Utah’s Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, as well as other members of the Senate’s Republican High-Tech Task Force. Hatch came out of the meeting talking about job creation, not privacy. “It was a productive meeting that underscored technology’s importance as a key engine in fueling job creation and putting the nation on the road to economic recovery,� he said in a statement, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, other company executives testified along with other technology employees from AT&T, Apple and Google at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about online privacy where senators said they’d be eyeing new online privacy rules by next year.

Democratic Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said during the aforementioned hearing that he was working with Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, also a Democrat, on proposed legislation for 2011. Politico reported that Kerry is likely to have “the full support of the committee’s top Democrats,� who have been involved in several privacy hearings this year. A separate online advertising regulatory bill has been drafted by some members of the House.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor also testified that vague legislation could ultimately harm technological innovation. AT&T’s Senior Vice President of Public Policy Dorothy Attwood and Google’s Engineering Lead for Privacy Alma Whitten had similar messages, advocating a loose regulatory framework around online businesses.

Privacy changes, security problems and other issues — along with rapid growth — have put Facebook in the political spotlight.

Facebook has been busy this year taking on the issue of online privacy, with other executives meeting with the Obama administration. Much of this prepping included hiring people to oversee global policy, D.C. legal expertise and even a California lobbyist. Of course Zuckerberg’s first trip to D.C. coinciding with Senate hearing testimony is also a part of the company’s committment to address privacy.

[Zuckerberg photo via Gabriel Bouys AFP/Getty]

Facebook can be a great tool for the journalist. It will allow you to get inside news by following the correct pages. It can provide tips for a future story,keep you in touch with the news, and the world in general. One fact that is true, tracking stories in the digital age has changed the face journalism completely. Facebook has been a large component in this. Here are 10 Media Sources and Publications that you may or may not know about, but every journalist should follow on their Facebook.

Our list of Facebook hires this week is a little thin but includes new adds to engineering, and advertising staff. The list, generated via LinkedIn, in alphabetical order:

• Roger Chen has joined Facebook as an engineer and comes from similar work at Greater Boston Area Information Technology and Services and Panjiva. He also interned for Qiming Venture Partners and Microsoft and previously did research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.


• Jocelyn Goldfein is now Director of Engineering at Facebook, which we previously reported. Her previous work was as a VP and general maanger at VMware.


• Richard Sim has joined the company as a product marketing manager of performance ads; before, Sim held a similar position at Anchor Intelligence, although he also worked as a product manager at MSN/Microsoft and atKeynote Systems.

There have been numerous blogs that have read into a story on Mark Zuckerberg’s profile stating that he installed Facebook for Android as a sign that he’s stopped using his iPhone. This is an inaccurate analysis as Mark Zuckerberg recently told an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View that he uses both an Android and an iPhone. At the time, he told the audience that he had both devices to check how Facebook functioned on both of them.



So for all those people who are reading into the feed story pictured below, there are two things to keep in mind: the story is old and it’s just another phone, not a replacement.

Remember when MySpace was crashing all the time and the stupid Pac Man game was showing up because the site was “overloaded” with traffic? Even if you weren’t a MySpace user back then, all you need to know is the frequency of MySpace going down due to technical issues was one of the main reasons Facebook was so successful. Facebook has been able to keep the site up despite the rapid growth in traffic, however with the company’s new questions product, Facebook doesn’t look as much like an original technological innovator.

Quora Takes Real-Time To A New Level

Quora’s interface is clean and user-friendly. The most remarkable aspect of it is how the site incorporates a lot of the functionality you would expect in a desktop application: growl notifications, real-time updates, and user-friendly search tools that make the site easy to navigate. Granted, scaling such a service to 500 million users as Facebook has is much more difficult. However one can see how challenges that the Quora team faced while working within Facebook would have become a headache.

Many hackers would prefer playing with new technologies than to solve the problems of how to scale a product to 500 million people. It’s not to suggest that either technical challenge is not an exciting one. It’s just that solving such problems for your own company, with new technologies that have been made available in recent years, can be much more exciting.

Facebook Questions Flaws

Before taking a look at the battle between Quora and the new Facebook Questions product, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the obvious flaws with Facebook questions as it exists today. Many of these will be resolved before the company rolls out the product to all users, however some of these issues are pretty basic:

• No link home from within questions - How do I get to the Questions home screen? Right now there’s only one link to get there, and that’s from the sidebar on the Facebook Homepage. If you are viewing a question, there’s no way to get back to the main questions feed. This navigational flaw is seriously annoying and it’s somewhat surprising that this didn’t come up in alpha testing.


• Adding topics is unintuitive - Right now the process for adding topics to a question within the Facebook Questions product is unintuitive. The box for adding topics is buried under other elements within the sidebar, however this is a core feature of the product. Adding topics increases the ability for others to discover the question. Simply put, topics should be promoted to a more significant position. Perhaps this is where Facebook could copy Quora again?


• How do you ask a question? - If you’re viewing a question currently, there’s no way to create a new question. Yes, I’m serious! Facebook wants people creating questions, however the only way to do so is from within the publisher. There’s also a way to create a question from within the search box on the questions homepage, however it’s not obvious that entering something in the search box will actually do anything aside from search.

My initial impression is that the Questions product didn’t go through much of a Q/A process or that the user experience person tasked with the project made some significant mistakes. Granted, Facebook is calling this a “Beta” product, but right now there are some serious navigational issues.

Facebook Vs Quora

Despite the fact that the Facebook Questions product has some significant design flaws, many of these issues can be quickly changed. When viewing the product from the broader perspective, Facebook Questions has overnight become an integral component of Facebook. So integral, that it has been promoted above Facebook Photos, Facebook’s most popular product, within the navigational sidebar and within the publisher. This is a major statement from Facebook, making it pretty obvious that the company has great expectations for the Questions product.

So can Facebook’s 500 million user base take on the extremely young Quora product? Right now, many of the core users at Quora are extremely active and the game dynamics keeps users coming back daily. While Facebook Questions may not be able to kill off the core Quora community, Facebook has definitely made it more challenging for Quora to become a mass market product. As the two products move toward each other in similarities, it’s going to be much more intuitive to just ask the question on Facebook than to visit another site.

While many will point to the differences of Quora versus Facebook, as they proudly exclaim that Quora will never die, it’s much easier for Facebook to steal Quora’s innovative features than for Quora to build a community of hundreds of millions of users. For what it’s worth, I’m an active Quora user and will continue to be as I love the community there, however when it comes to building a Q&A product with hundreds of millions of users, Facebook may have already put the nail in the coffin.

The young and agile Quora may make Facebook look like a slow moving behemoth, as MySpace appeared in comparison to Facebook, however Facebook may have just pushed Quora out of the mass consumer Q&A market, just as Google has previously done to so many young startups.

Mazda’s new Mazda2 is the star of the company’s new Facebook game called DriverVille, a title that has you souping up your car then racing it. It is also, of course, meant to get more people paying attention to the launch of the new Mazda2 model, with an accompanying sweepstakes also running on the Mazda Facebook page.

The game appears to have been built by Frima, a Quebec-based game developer that creates branded titles. All in all, the quality is good. There’s plenty of built-in advertising, but it doesn’t feel overblown or forced. And it’s actually informative, so it should appeal to casual gamers and those actually hoping to learn a little more about the Mazda2.

The gist is pretty simple — you complete missions to level up, earning Driver Bucks and items along the way that range from a pair of cowboy boots to your very own virtual Mazda2. The Driver Bucks earned can be used to purchase items to accent your Mazda2, your home garage or your DriverVille avatar.

All the activities in the game can be broadcast through your newsfeed to share with friends, and several of the trophies that can be earned in the game center around bringing more people into the game, adding to the viral element.

Once inside the DriverVille universe, you and your friends will be able to move between several locations, including an arcade with interactive games, a movie theater with video clips of Mazda2 advertising, an outlet to use your Driver Bucks to buy items and a Mazda dealership, complete with a brochure rack full of PDFs for all Mazda’s 2011 models.

The actual driving in DriverVille is done on one of several race tracks and leaves a little to be desired. It’s Spy Hunter-esque. The controls are simple and intuitive, so it should appeal to the broad range of people that will probably be playing the game. Most of the attention has been placed on the social elements of the game, and those are well thought-out and complete.

As you wander through the world of DriverVille, you’ll encounter the avatars of other players. You can engage them to see their garages and cars, and you can also choose to visit their actual Facebook pages.

The game coincides with a sweepstakes run through the Mazda2 Facebook page, with the grand prize being an actual Mazda2. Several 64GB iPod Touches will also be awarded as weekly prizes. The campaign is being run by the ad agency Doner, which also worked on the Mazda3 launch for Mazda.

Administrators of the official Jeep Facebook page posted a status update yesterday instructing fans to submit their personal Jeep photos to Flickr instead of Facebook. While this move by Jeep seems counterintuitive, the American manufacturer apparently had so many photos being uploaded by fans they exceeded Facebook’s photo album size for Photos by Others with 20,000 total photos. Instead of asking fans to stop submitting photos, they are sending fans to Flickr for photo uploads while Facebook “fixes the glitch”.

Jeep has "only" 528,000 fans and trails (pun intended) BMW, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Audi and Porsche in the Automotive category for total fans. Despite this disparity in fans, Jeep has substantially more Photos by Others with the nearest being BMW with 15,560 photos. A deeper dive reveals that Jeep fans outpace the leading pages on Facebook and may be the first (or one of the first) pages to reach this limit. Here are the stats for some other pages.

• Michael Jackson: 17.2 Million Fans - 17,000 Photos


• Lady Gaga: 14.0 Million Fans - 4,000 Photos


• Starbucks: 11.2 Million Fans - 4,700 Photos


• Megan Fox: 10.5 Million Fans - 1,000 Photos

The Twilight Saga would likely be near the top in terms of photos, but the page administrators have disabled this functionality on the Twilight page. So for now, the Jeep page appears to reign supreme in the Photos by Others race for both its own category and possibly Facebook pages overall. For those who are curious about why Jeep has attracted so many fan photos, here are some examples of what their fans are submitting to Facebook.

James Nichols is a Managing Partner at Ambition Capital, a think tank focused on the social web.

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem. When you place job listings on the Inside Network Job Board, they’ll be distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Here are this week’s new listings from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at EA2D, MeYou Health, HumaNature Studios, Neoedge, Ohai, and Days of Wonder:

• 2D Artist – EA2D (Redwood City, CA)
  
  

• Facebook Product Manager (Boston, MA)
  
  

• Consumer Marketing Manager (Los Altos, CA)

• QA Manager (San Francisco, CA)
  
  


• Senior Game Designer (San Francisco, CA)
  
  


• Art Director (San Francisco, CA)

• ActionScript / JavaScript Software Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• Senior Server Side Software Engineer (Albany, CA)

Check out more top Facebook Platform and social gaming jobs on the Inside Network Job Board.