Facebook is introducing its take on Twitter’s trending topics. Unlike the microblogging service, however, Facebook Trending does not organize it using hashtags.
The popular social networking service will be adding a module into users’ news feed page that would suggest topics that are trending on Facebook, which might interest them. The Trending list will appear on the top right-hand corner of the news feed, at least in the desktop version.
Users in United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India, and Australia would be the first to witness Facebook Trending within the first two weeks. Other countries, as well as the mobile app versions, will get the update later.
Coming up with a Trending section is a challenge for Facebook, considering that most of the conversation happening within this social network are privately shared among friends. In contrast, Twitter acts like a public conversation and its trends are based on which topics are gaining more noise.
In an interview posted on the New York Times, Chris Struhar, an engineering manager working on Facebook Trending, said the new service is designed to be more customized and easier to understand compared to Twitter’s trending topics.
“Showing just the topic name, you kind of look at that and say, ‘I don’t understand why this thing is trending,'” he said.
In Facebook Trending, the site will suggest three topics to each user, along with headlines from news websites to help users understand what the conversation is about. The topics that appear on the News Feed are based on the user’s own interests and other criteria namely: the authority of the people commenting on the topic, how recent the topic has surged on the site, and how many users are talking about it at that moment.
Source: New York Times
Image source: New York Times
