Jason Oakley : The life of an Aussie geek!

Recently, there’ve been a few emails and quotes from Jason Calacanis regarding how Mark Zuckerberg should run Facebook and how to be more open and friendly. He’s even requested that instead of copying other people (ie. Twitter), Facebook should work with or outright purchase the technology which they want to add to Facebook.

It appears Mark has not taken these comments lightly and is now in fact working on taking on Mahalo.com as well as Yahoo! Answers, eHow and other Search-bait information sites.

Enter the newest product being beta tested on Facebook:

Upcoming Facebook application

You can “help build the future of Facebook” by applying to be a beta tester for this new application. If your questions and answers are of a decent quality you may be picked to be added to the team.  The format of this appears to be almost exactly the same as Mahalo Answers, Yahoo! Answers and others.

These sites use the pages as search-bait or link-bait in order to get people to visit the sites. One poses a question and can read a detailed answer, often citing other websites for more information.  This seems to be a rather lucrative practice as you can find many similar sites around the internet with the same idea. The fact that it happens to be in beta right now, not so long after Jason Calacanis has posted his thoughts about Facebook and the way Mark Zuckerberg runs it makes it seem like Mark is slapping Jason in the face by specifically using this idea.  This is, of course, speculation on my part but the timing is at least interesting.