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 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.

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.

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.

On Tuesday I discussed how to use questions on your Facebook Page to dramatically boost traffic to your company blog. The one thing that I glossed over quickly was how Facebook calculates share and like counts. The number that Facebook currently displays is the total number of likes, shares, and comments on any given link. Many people previously weren’t aware of how that number is calculated which is why I’ve gone and created the Facebook Like Count Calculator.



Since we just launched it, the calculator can sometime take a while to load, however we’ll release an asynchronous version shortly which doesn’t run into the same type of page load issues. The tool was created to simply illustrate how Facebook calculates Facebook share and like counts. The first thing that may come to mind is whether or not this is how Facebook should display counts? Since it’s not actually the number of likes or shares, why is Facebook displaying it like it is?

I would argue that this calculation benefits the publisher. The greater the number in the like or share box, the more likely a visitor will click on it. While it’s not the most accurate representation, it’s helping out the publisher, and ultimately, that’s Facebook’s primary goal with the like and the share buttons. If you want to see how share and like counts are calculated, go check out our Facebook Like Count Calculator.

Rather letting Spanish users know which friends have birthdays today, many are being greeted with the message “f*ck you b*tches”. The message, which appears to have been accomplished by tricking the Facebook Translations application, is being reported by numerous Facebook users who are viewing the site in Spanish. Other vulgar phrases seen around the site include, “See all dicks” rather than “See all photos” and “va a follar con”, which is an extremely vulgar Spanish phrase.



The reports have been streaming in to our inbox for the past few hours and it hasn’t slowed down. Numerous users are reporting the issue, however most of those users who are reporting it, all appear to be viewing the site in Spanish. By installing the Facebook Translations application and switching to “Spanish”, you can view many of the errors taking place. This isn’t the first time this trick has been used to spread vulgar messages throughout the site.

Due to a flaw in the Facebook Translations application, if enough people vote on an incorrect translation, that phrase will be replace what was previously a legitimate phrase. So far Facebook hasn’t had a chance to resolve the issue, however we’d expect Facebook to fix it pretty quickly as word spreads about the issue. I won’t bother to post screenshots of the issues taking place in other areas around the site, however if you are looking to find some vulgar phrases, switch over to the Spanish version of Facebook and poke around for a little bit.

With millions of Latin American users viewing Facebook daily, plenty of people have already been exposed at this point.

This afternoon I was having a discussion with a leading app developer about the future of virtual goods on the Facebook Platform. One thing that came up during the discussion was the idea of a centralized virtual goods system on Facebook. It’s something that I first described when Facebook announced that they were killing the gift shop next month, however it has increasingly become a center of focus for me personally. With all these applications selling virtual goods, why isn’t their an easier way to show off the goods that we’ve purchased?



With Facebook ramping up their Credits product, it’s not completely ridiculous that the company would kill off their gifts product, however the core idea was pretty smart: let people purchase virtual goods as well as receive those virtual goods as gifts from friends and show them off in their profile. The tie between virtual goods and identity is a critical component of any burgeoning virtual goods ecosystem. Somehow, Facebook has a massive virtual goods ecosystem without this key association (the one between virtual goods and identity), however I don’t believe this is sustainable.

The main flaw with the existing system is that when a user stops playing a game (like FarmVille for example), the virtual goods from that game do not transfer anywhere. In other words, all the money that was spent (which will soon be Facebook Credits) ends up being money that was spent on content that was not retained and had no lasting value. Tied in as part of the Facebook profile, those virtual goods can be saved forever. Most obvious is that virtual goods serve as digital artifacts that form a core component of an individual’s online identity.

Given that Facebook profiles serve as the primary representation of an individual’s digital identity, it’s only logical that virtual goods would become integrated and allow the application experience to live on, once the application is gone. This would not only increase the volume of transactions to take place with Facebook Credits, but it would also benefit the entire ecosystem. According to people I’ve spoken to, this concept is something that Sean Parker has personally pressed for, as well as other execs, however Mark Zuckerberg is not as big of a fan of the concept.

However the internal political debate is playing out isn’t really that relevant though. The main point is this: Facebook must provide some sort of central archive for individual virtual goods within the profile to help further the virtual goods ecosystem and accelerate usage of Facebook Credits, something the company is currently focused heavily on.

The changes that went along with the official beta release of Facebook Questions today make it slightly more difficult for users to write a regular status update. For users who have beta access to Facebook Questions, the old status update box is gone and it now takes two clicks to write a status update.



The new publisher tool gives users four tabs across the top - Update status, Ask question, Add photos and Post link. To write a status update, you now need to first click ‘Update status’, then write your status and submit.

The status will then appear in your timeline and friends’ news feeds but it will no longer appear next to your name on your profile page.

Similarly, it now takes two clicks to write on someone’s wall.

The status update has long been a core part of the Facebook experience, forming the backbone of the news feed on users’ home pages. It remains to be seen whether the additional step will discourage users from updating their statuses or not.

A Delaware court has knocked down a claim against Facebook for patent violation made by little-known software company Leader Technologies.



The lawsuit filed in 2008 by the Ohio-based firm alleged that Facebook had infringed one of its patents relating "to a method and system for the management and storage of electronic information." The 2006 patent document says the "invention relates to new structures and methods for creating relationships between users, applications, files, and folders."

After a six-day hearing, the jury ruled in Facebook’s favor today. Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, welcomed the decision and called on legislators to reform patent law to reduce baseless claims. "From the day this lawsuit was filed, we said the patent was invalid and the case was without merit and we are gratified the jury agreed," he said in a statement sent to AllFacebook. "Facebook is a strong advocate of legal reforms that would limit baseless patent claims such as this one, and in the meantime we will continue to defend vigorously any patent lawsuit filed against us."

You can read the patent document below for yourself to judge its merit, but as a general comment it seems so-called patent squatting is a growing problem for digital businesses. It’s easy for companies or individuals to take out an overly broad patent and then claim infringement. While the courts would generally throw out baseless claims, it takes time and money to defend the claims and many cases are settled out of court. This is not the first intellectual property claim that Facebook has been forced to defend.