'Facebook Questions' launches, lets you poll Facebook's 500 million users

Facebook today officially introduced a new feature called Facebook Questions, the social network's take on crowdsourced question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Hunch.

The new feature, still classified as a beta, lets users ask questions of the vast Facebook community of more than 500 million simply by typing them into a new field labeled "What do you want to know?"

While it has not yet been rolled out to all users, the new Facebook Questions feature will appear as a button labeled "Ask Question" across a users' homepage.

Along with asking simple text questions, users can also include photographs, links, or polls. The topic of the question can then be tagged, and users who have that same topic listed in their interests will see the question. For example, if you have a question about the TV show "24," users who have the show listed on their profile under "Likes and Interests" will be more likely to see your question than someone who does not.

"Keep in mind that all questions and answers posted using the Questions application are public and visible to everyone on the Internet," Facebook Product Director Blake Ross reminded users today.

Like Yahoo Answers, there is no limit to what topics a user can provide answers to. They can simply browse through questions and provide their answers as they like.