It appears that Facebook is starting to phase out its Facebook Questions feature. You may have used the feature to answer a question in a poll that one of your Facebook friends put together. The Facebook Questions feature was something that everyone on Facebook could use in order to get a “crowd sourced” answer to a specific question. It could also be used to set up a poll. Ask a question, set up a few, specific, options for potential answers, and wait to see which one got selected the most.

Recently, Facebook made a slight change to the Facebook Questions feature. Pages, events, and groups are still able to use it. However, individual users are not. The option no longer is available to them.

If you are one of the many people who has created Facebook Pages or Groups for your podcast, guild, book club, or school club, then you can still use Facebook Questions. The difference is that individual users cannot ask questions from the top of their News Feed anymore. You should still be able to see questions that you’ve asked in the past by going to your Activity Log.

Personally, I never used the Facebook Questions feature. I think my husband set up a couple of polls for one of our podcasts, just for fun. I just never saw the purpose of setting up a poll on my personal Facebook page. To be honest, my first choice for getting a “crowd sourced” answer to a question is Twitter, not Facebook.

In short, the Facebook Questions feature still exists, but in a more limited fashion. There is some speculation that perhaps Facebook is getting ready to launch an actual search product. There really aren’t any solid details about what, exactly, that is going to look like or how it will function as of yet.

I think it would be cool if Facebook would create a functional search engine that would let you easily find all the coupons that are scattered through Facebook. I also think it might be a bit of a privacy invasion if random people could search for, let’s say, a political party, and have their results show the comments that various Facebook users have made in regards to that topic.

Image: Stock Photo 3d Question Mark by BigStock

Halloween is going to generate a frightening number of photos, many of which will immediately be posted to various forms of social media. If you went through the trouble to create an interesting costume, odds are you want your online friends to be able to see it. There is a good chance that the people you have connected with through social media will click on the photo of you in costume. A few days later, everyone will collectively forget about these photos.

There are about one billion people who are active Facebook users. These users upload about 300 million photos a day. They post even more on special occasions, such as Halloween. According to Jay Parikh, Facebook’s Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering:

“Halloween is one of our biggest photo upload days of the year. We will get between probably 1 and 2 billion photos uploaded just in a single day.”

Basically, what happens is that Halloween causes a whole lot of photos to be posted, and then ignored. However, Facebook has a user agreement that says that it will not delete data that users post just because no one has looked at it in a while. All these photos have to go somewhere!

The solution might be Cold Storage. It could provide a way for Facebook to store all those photos on tapes in a data center. The advantages are that it will provide Facebook with a lot of storage while keeping the cost of power consumption low. The potential drawback is that it could make accessing the photo slower for users.

Cold Storage will be part of the infrastructure of Facebook within the next year or two. Facebook has an Open Source Data Center website. that is updated with more information from time to time. Soon, the photo you posted five years ago of yourself in a Halloween costume could be preserved in cold storage. One can only hope that you didn’t decide to dress as the Geico Caveman that year.

Image: Stock Photo Grim Reaper by BigStock

Facebook just announced that Promoted Posts are now being tested with Facebook users who live in the United States. It has been made available to people who currently use Facebook and who have fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers.

I’ve been seeing this story all over the internet today, but it actually goes back a bit farther. In May of 2012, I wrote a blog on Geek News Central that talked about when Facebook launched a test of the Promoted Posts feature with Facebook users from New Zealand. Some interesting changes seem to have been made!

There were more options offered in the test of Promoted Posts in New Zealand than what has been made available here in the United States. In May, Facebook users from New Zealand could have Facebook promote one of their posts for free, or for as much as $2.00. At the time, it appeared that the company was attempting to learn exactly how much money people would be willing to pay to have one of their posts Promoted. In May, the Promoted Posts were going to appear in a bright yellow, to make them more eye-catching than the rest of a person’s Facebook news feed.

Since then, Facebook has gradually rolled out the test of Promoted Posts to more than 20 countries. It just arrived for Facebook users who live in the United States. Now, when you Promote one of your posts, you cause it to be bumped up higher in the news feed of your Facebook friends. There is no mention of it becoming a bright yellow, though.

There is a feature that allows you to see how your Promoted Post is doing. You can see how many regular views it got, and compare that to how many “paid views” it got. According to The Verge it will cost about $7.00 for one Promoted Post. It would be nice to know what that $7.00 did for you, if anything.

It appears that Facebook is trying to make money without having to rely entirely on ads. In addition to the Promoted Posts, Facebook is also going to be launching a Facebook Gift Shop that will enable you to send real world gifts to the home or office of your Facebook friends.

Image by: Stock Photo Dollar by BigStock

Soon, Facebook will have a new feature. The Facebook Gift Store will allow users to spend real world money to send an “in real life” gift to an online friend that they have connected with on Facebook. Does anyone else find this as bizarre as I do?

I understand that the primary purpose of the Facebook Gift Store is to generate revenue for Facebook. I’ve heard this described as a somewhat unique way for Facebook to make some money without having to rely entirely on ads.

The financial aspects make a certain amount of sense to me. Facebook is hoping that thousands of its users will want to spend money at the Facebook Gift Store in order to send their Facebook friends a teddy bear, some cupcakes, socks, a Facebook gift card, or all manner of other products. There is a video about the Facebook Gift Store that shows just how easy it is to send your Facebook friend a gift. The option to do it will appear with the birthday reminders, and in a bunch of other places on Facebook.

It is the social aspects of the Facebook Store that perplex me. While there are some people who only “Friend” their relatives, this isn’t what typically happens. How many of you have “friended” someone who you vaguely know because you work at the same place? Have you ever “friended” a podcaster, author, or musician because you like his or her work? Imagine how awkward it would be to learn that some random person, who is basically a stranger, has decided to send a gift to your home or office!

Let’s say one of your co-workers, whom you barely know, (but who is your Facebook Friend), decides to send a box of cupcakes to your home for your birthday. Should you bring the box to the employee lounge, to share with everyone? Are you now obligated to send that person a box of cupcakes on his or her next birthday? How does one explain to their significant other why a person, whom you never once mentioned, has sent you a gift? I think the Facebook Gift Store is going to bring a whole lot of drama.

Image: Stock Photo Cupcakes by BigStock

Remember a while back when Facebook let you customize the URL that connected to your Facebook page? Many of us went ahead and did that so we would have some choice about what it would be. Mine is www.facebook.com/jen.thorpe.

I know that I’m not the one and only Jen Thorpe in this world, and for some reason, I felt the need to make sure that my name was in my Facebook URL before someone else could grab it. So, I got the snazzy little Facebook URL, and promptly forgot all about it.

Until today, that is. It appears that Facebook has found a use for the unique Facebook URL names that a bunch of us made, and then ignored. I have a brand new, shiny, @facebook.com email address – and you do too (if you use Facebook). The email address is based on the URL that your Facebook page has attached to it. So, that makes mine jen.thorpe@Facebook.com.

If I am understanding this correctly, it would be possible for me to go look you up on Facebook, and be able to discern what your Facebook email address would be. I don’t even have to be your “Friend”.

For example, the URL of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page is www.facebook.com/zuck. I haven’t actually “Friended” him on Facebook, but, it is still possible for me to figure out what his Facebook email address probably is. It’s a good thing that I am not one of those spammers who likes to send out a ton of email to random people about pharmaceuticals.

It is my understanding that the prevailing view is that Facebook went ahead and changed everyone’s profile so that the @Facebook.com email address appears instead of whatever other email address you chose to put there.

Both Lifehacker and Gizmodo have created a guide that will allow you to fix this problem.

Now, I went and checked my Facebook information, and I noticed that Facebook did not automatically change my “real” email address to my @Facebook.com email address. I am using Timeline. It seems that someone could send you an email at your Facebook email address and it will appear in your Facebook messages inbox. That email would not get sent to your “real” email address. You would have to log into Facebook and use the Facebook message system in order to find it, respond to it, or delete it.

I can think of one, excellent, use for my Facebook email address. I play some of the Zynga games on Facebook, (and a couple over at Zynga.com). Zynga is always asking me to allow them to send me email when another player sends me a virtual, in-game, item. I didn’t want that type of email spamming up my “real” email’s inbox, but, I don’t really care if it fills up my Facebook messages. After all, like many of you, I generally ignore my Facebook messages inbox.

Image: Stock-Photo-Email by BigStock