World's largest social networking site Facebook has announced a new feature called "Trending" that will show popular topics of ongoing conversations.
The "trending" feature is "designed to surface interesting and relevant conversations in order to help you discover the best content from all across Facebook," wrote company's engineering manager, Chris Struhar, in a blog post.
Generally users turn to Facebook for catching up on their personal networks and to Twitter for hot topics on social media. However, Facebook wants to change that and this feature aims to provide users an amalgam of the personal news and hottest topics of the moment at one place.
The list of trending topics will appear in the top right corner of the News Feed and will be tailored to the user's interests and location.
The feature that echoes Twitter's trending feature is one of the latest initiative taken by Facebook to make it a go-to destination for finding out what's hot on the Web. However, unlike Twitter's trending feature that simply lists the hottest topics, Facebook's trending section will offer an explanation of why a particular topic is trending.
"Showing just the topic name, you kind of look at that and say, I don't understand why this thing is trending," said Struhar in an interview.
Facebook's Trending section will suggest three topics to every user with a headline. Once the user clicks on the headline, he will be taken to a page that will contain the related stories, public posts and other items. Additional suggested topics can also be pulled up.
Starting with users of U.S., U.K., India, Canada and Australia, the trending section feature will be rolled to users in other countries subsequently.
As of now the trending feature will only be available on desktop version of Facebook, but the company said it was testing the feature in its app for smartphones and tablets as well.
