Facebook Acquires Interest Graph-Focused Question and Answer Service Friend.ly
Baku, October 11 (AZERTAC). Facebook has acquired friend.ly, developers of a Facebook-integrated website that lets users get to know their friend better by asking them questions about their interests. The friend.ly website will continue to operate, but the team will be “focusing on new projects at Facebook” according to an announcement on friend.ly`s blog.
The friend.ly team`s experience getting people to reveal things about their identities could help Facebook coax more biographical data from users. This data could then be used to strengthen ad targeting.
What distinguishes friend.ly from other question and answer services is that it bases the questions that it suggests users ask on the Facebook interest graph. Friend.ly pulls a user`s Likes and the Likes of their friends, and then suggests relevant questions.
For example, if it finds that a friend Likes “skiing”, it might suggest a user ask them where their favorite place to ski is. If a user Likes CNN, they might receive the question “What do you like about CNN?” Users can select to share their answers to their Facebook wall, Twitter, or the wall of an official Page related to the question, all of which drive referral traffic to the service.
This interest graph question strategy provides much more compelling questions than the random, spammy, or purposefully controversial ones suggested by some other Q&A services. This leads to a higher rate of users actually sending the questions and receiving responses back.
We profiled friend.ly in April during the middle of a rapid growth period brought on by this strategy. It gained 6.5 million monthly active users and 350,000 daily active users in a few short months. Since peaking in June and July, the site has fallen back to just 291,000 MAU 10,00 DAU. This could be in part due to a switch to less spammy tactics where sharing is opt in rather than opt out.
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