The new Questions has been built to spread throughout networks of friends, unlike the last version, which was only available to pockets of beta testers. Users can still ask open-ended questions on the service if they want to, but Facebook will mostly highlight requests for advice from friends in users’ feeds.

All questions are still public, and answers by all users to the same question are listed on the same page. However, each user gets a personalized view of the responses, ranked by what their friends voted. Respondents only have to check a box to participate in the poll themselves, and information about a movie or restaurant can be quickly included by linking to its Facebook page.

The current version of Facebook Questions is much more differentiated from Quora than the previous one, which had in many ways resembled the Q&A site founded by former Facebookers. In fact, Quora explicitly disallows polls.

The original Questions had a particularly rocky product launch, with lots of initial bugginess and a slow roll-out.

The new version is to be available much more broadly (though right now available only in English), Facebook said. Users can get access to the beta by opting in at Facebook.com/questions.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

That was the finding of a Harris Interactive survey that’s being released later today. The poll, of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, found that 48 percent of tablet users are viewing or transmitting sensitive information on their devices. That compares to some 30 percent of respondents that reported such information was passing through their smartphones.

Both work and personal information is clearly finding its way on to both tablets and smartphones, though more of those surveyed said they had confidential personal information than reported having sensitive business data.

Dig down a level and the survey found that men are more likely than women to be confident in the security of their data on a tablet or smartphone. The same goes for the young, as compared to those who are older, according to the survey, which was done by Harris on behalf of Fuzebox.

However, there are plenty of people at both ends of the spectrum on this question. About 18 percent of those surveyed are either extremely or very confident in the security of the data being transferred on their device, while 15 percent said that they are not at all confident in the security of the data that is being transferred over their devices, whether tablet or smartphone.

“As the use of tablets increase across the world, mobile security will become a vitally important factor in the delivery of services to these platforms, especially as users more willingly trust these devices for sensitive and private information,” Fuzebox CEO Jeff Cavins said in a statement. Fuzebox makes collaboration and communications software that runs on various types of computing platforms, including mobile devices.

Brown has plenty of noteworthy contributors of his own, but they tilt decidedly toward the southern end of the state.

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Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.

The New York Times polled some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, and concluded that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent, or “possibly a bit less.” Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.

Worth noting, but not in a newsworthy way: We’ve been headed in this direction for a while. Publishers, including the New York Times (NYT), Gannett (GCI) and McClatchy (MNI), started making hopeful murmurs–or less hopeless murmurs, really–earlier this summer. But all they’re really saying is that:

• Things don’t seem to be getting any worse, and
• It’s nearly impossible for year-over-year comparisons not to improve for the rest of the year since results will be measured against those posted in the fall of 2008, when the economy was in shocked-and-awed mode. Which we knew. But still worth repeating, and something we’ll probably repeat many more times through the rest of this year.

This iPhone app lets you track the campaign anywhere you go.

Election ’08 contains the latest national tracking polls and performs an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning currently in each state based on multiple available polls in that state. Then, it generates an electoral vote projection. It also gives the sources of the polls, and provides recent and historical data for context.

Some iTunes commenters complained that the app’s polling data were stale, but today, it seems up to date.

The program, from a company called Chimp Software, lets you view the data in a variety of ways–most recent data, alphabetical by state, battleground states only, or in lists arranged by each candidate’s strongest states, in descending order (McCain is cleaning up in Utah, Obama is uncatchable in DC.)

If you care about politics, and understand that polls aren’t perfect, Election ’08 can put a snapshot of the political horse race in your pocket.