TNR | Facebook Facilitates Twitter-esque Trending With New Feature Expected in US and UK Soon

[Carl]

Facebook are to introduce a similar-but-different version of “trending†to their social media network during 2014. Whilst when one thinks of the word trending they tend to immediately think of Twitter, the version to be launched on Facebook is expected to be more geared towards the user than it is towards subjects being discussed on a national or even global level.

Facebook Trending will feature as a new, separate news feed on user screens. It will reflect subjects and topics of friends and pages “liked†by users instead of reflecting those which are being the most widely discussed across the social network. Also, rather than just giving “hash-tagged†topic titles as per Twitter, the Facebook feed will give an analysis of what sort of thing is being said about the subjects.

Regular Facebook users will be aware of the company already having a basic variant of this in place. On news feeds, depending on your privacy settings, Facebook already reports when friends have used certain keywords, such as Christmas, in their status updates, as well as when they have wished mutual friends a happy birthday. The new version will, however, be more advanced.

As a number of people have somewhat diverse ranges of friends with different interests on Facebook it’s going to be interesting to see how well this specific system of trending works in comparison to Twitter’s universal, somewhat easier to establish general trend reporting. A peculiar factor in this new system will be that at first it isn’t going to be available on the mobile version of the social network app.

Most observers in the industry expect web access, and social networking in particular, to be more mobile device driven than the current desktop and laptop PC means of access. As Facebook are one of the companies to have predicted this move over the next year, it is unusual that they have not immediately worked to get the new feature working on the mobile platform.

The desktop Facebook Trending should appear on the profile pages of users in the UK and the USA over the next two to three weeks, with other areas gradually getting the change over the first half of 2014.