Facebook has put a new service into beta: Facebook Questions. Broadly speaking, it’s a way of crowd-sourcing answers to your queries, no matter how specific (or inane). Pose a question in much the same way as you’d update your status, and it’ll be displayed to your friends, their friends, and any other Facebook users who’ve declared an interest in that topic.

Take it away blog.facebook.com:

“To help us show your question to the most relevant people and ensure the best answers, you can tag it with a specific topic. For instance, if you have a question about what type of camera you should buy, you could tag it with “Photography.” If you want to find the best bike routes in the area, you might tag it with “Cycling.”… The questions you ask will be shown to people who have expressed interest in the particular topics you tag.”

It’s a user-generated development; Facebook have spotted a pattern in usage – “Millions of people ask their friends questions on Facebook every day” says Blake Ross on the official Facebook blog – and have developed a feature reflecting that pattern.

Here are some Facebook Questions questions:

Has Yahoo! Answers come to mind yet? It’s a good example of the shortfalls of expecting answers from the internet. Wikipedia works because it’s moderated; will Facebook Answers be compromised by its open nature? Only time will tell. There’s been some discussion of Facebook Questions as a replacement for Google as the go-to for quick answers. Can the massed expertise of Facebook users rival Google’s algorithim? Answers in the comments please…