Facebook may not openly admit it, but the social network is clearly taking a swipe at Twitter by bringing its Trending Topics to mobile.
In a blog post by Facebook product managers Diana Hsu and Andrew Song, Facebook announced that it is "making it easy for people to explore stories from different sources" by introducing the one-year-old Web-only feature to Facebook for mobile.
"The new Trending experience begins rolling out today, and will be available to people on Facebook in the U.S. for the web and Android," say Hsu and Song. "Support for iOS and other countries is coming soon."
Although Facebook has been panned by critics for copying Twitter, the new Trending for mobile actually goes beyond features offered by the microblogging website, which has defined itself as the real-time outlet of choice for breaking news on the Internet.
When Trending was introduced for the Web in January, the new feature mimicked Twitter's features in that the hottest topics from media outlets were presented in one big, messy glob of news stories with not much to help users figure out what the trending stories were all about. Occasionally, Facebook would throw in a post from a friend into the mix.
Unlike Twitter, which relies simply on hashtags to let users try and make sense out of the jumble by themselves, the old Facebook Trending provided a short explanation of why each topic was trending. For instance, "The Little Prince" is trending because "1st trailer for computer-animated adaptation of French novella debuts."
The new Trending for mobile goes a little bit more beyond that to bring the trending stories in a more organized way so users can sift through the trending posts based on the owners of the post.
"Right after we launched the initial version of Trending, we spent time asking what types of things they were interested in seeing," Song says. "There's a lot of good content shared publicly but it's really hard to find on the page."
Once users open the Trending tab, they can choose to view editor-handpicked posts from media outlets, which sit right at the top of the tab so people get a background of what the topic is all about. They can then choose to find out what their friends and groups are saying or to hear from people they don't know, including those who are directly involved in the story, provided they have set their posts to public, of course, and people who are near the scene.
The Live Feed will also show users a real-time stream of reactions from users around the world, with the Facebook algorithm preferring posts from the users' friends. Song describes the Live Feed as a way to show "how people were reacting and how people are sharing without compromising the ability to get an overview."
