This afternoon, I saw a link on the lower right of my Facebook page, inviting me to become a Facebook beta-tester. Interested, I clicked it, and this is what I saw:
As you can see, the application consists of having the applicant submit some writing which they’ll assumably assess for quality.
It would appear that Facebook may be planning to launch topical articles, similar to a Yahoo! Answers or Wikipedia.
If a large knowledge library on a variety of topics becomes available through Facebook, then the platform becomes even stickier, retaining their users for even longer. One hypothetical question occurs to me:
“How might Facebook take marketshare from Wikipedia, now that the service already is competing strongly against Google?”
I think we’ve found that particular answer.
ShareThisTags: Facebook
I have noticed something similar when I did a search on facebook for something that neither had a fanpage nor a group or profile – the “community pages”.
Here’s what I received:
Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for “SEARCHED TERM”, sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help. You can also get us started by suggesting a relevant Wikipedia article or the Official Site.
[…] adoption of Wikipedia content and Google’s overall preferential rankings of Wikipedia, Facebook has been testing out articles that are highly similar to Wikipedia’s. In fact, Facebook’s article pages have actually […]