Facebook Adds Trending Topics In Continuing Evolution Toward Social News Network
Facebook, in its continuing quest to make its social network more public and "newsy," announced "Trending" on Thursday, a new feature that will put a list of trending topics up in the top right corner of every user's News Feed. The addition of this feature confirms that Facebook sees Twitter as both a threat and a model for news-focused social content.
Engineering Manager Chris Struhar made the announcement in Facebook's Newsroom, bringing up the Golden Globes and the death of Nelson Mandela as examples of what users could find in the new trending section. "Today we're announcing Trending," wrote Struhar, "a new product that's designed to surface interesting and relevant conversations in order to help you discover the best content from all across Facebook."
The trending list will be personalized based on topics that users are interested in, as well as what stories are trending across the world's largest social media network. In the trending section, you'll see a headline and a brief explanation as to why it's trending. When you click on a trending topic, Facebook will take you to the most active posts from your friends, or other pages that are talking about that subject.
Facebook began testing trending topics in late summer of 2013, but now it will begin rolling out to a larger general audience soon, including users in the U.S., U.K., India, and Australia, according to Read-Write. Facebook says it is still testing out the trending feature on mobile.
Facebook's trending list is similar to Twitter's trending topics, which have been a part of that social network for a long time. However, Twitter trending topics can be tailored to cities or countries, but aren't personalized to a user's specific interest. Using News Feed's deep, mysterious powers of analyzing your activity to find out just what subjects you're interested in -- and personalizing its trending topics based on that knowledge -- is one aspect where Facebook is innovating over its competition.
Otherwise, Facebook's addition of trending to its user interface is just another example of the most popular social network taking a page directly out of Twitter's playbook. In 2013, Facebook added Twitterific hashtags in July to open wall posts, status updates, or other messages into "Public Conversations." The Twitter emulation continued about a month later when Facebook announced that public posts on the network would be embeddable into other websites, blogs, and (Facebook was hoping) news outlets, much like Tweets.
Facebook's Twitter emulation comes as Facebook is attempting to make its social network the place for adults to share and read news -- perhaps because it realizes that it's no longer the hippest place for teens to do pure social networking. The addition of Twitter features and the constant tinkering with its News Feed has obviously had some positive effect, as Pew found in October that 30 percent of U.S. adults use Facebook to consume news - more than any other site.
With the addition of Trending, expect Facebook to continue to push itself as a social news site this year.