A few days ago, we noted that Facebook Questions, one of the service’s latest products, had mysteriously vanished. Naturally, this led to questions on rival service Quora about whether or not the service had been killed. Considering that the product wasn’t yet a month old, that seemed silly. Sure enough, it was silly. Facebook Questions has risen from the “dead” and reappeared this evening.
To be clear, the service is still only turned on for a fraction of Facebook’s 500 million users (we’re talking single digit percentages). But as Facebook told us on Monday, they shut it off for some of those users as they ran some tests. Product lead Blake Ross, meanwhile, left us a comment noting that “We change test groups with Facebook Questions all the time. The original test group will regain access to the product tomorrow afternoon.”
Well, it ended up being a little later than that (the blog Inside Facebook just noted the rollback yesterday, for example), but it is back now.
On top of being back, things also look a bit more polished and seems to run a bit smoother. That said, I’m seeing way too many questions asking “How would Facebook be different if it were run by Sarah Palin?”
Update: I also posted a Facebook Question a few minutes ago asking what percentage of Facebook had access to the service. None other than Blake Ross responded quickly. “Around 0.02% of the Facebook userbase has access to the product. I quoted a higher number earlier this evening, but that was off by a bit,” he wrote.
Update 2: Humorously, below in the comments, Ross notes that he’s the one who asked the Palin question as a test earlier.
[thanks Orli]