Soon after introducing hashtags, Facebook confirmed that it’s now testing another Twitter-esque feature: trending topics.
“Today we started running a small test that displays topics trending on Facebook,” confirmed the social network. “It is currently only available to a small percentage of U.S. users who use Facebook’s mobile web site (m.facebook.com) and is still in very early stages of development.”
What those mobile users will see is a banner atop their News Feed that will highlight the people and subject matter that Facebook users are talking about the most. Tapping the banner will reveal what their friends are saying about the topic in addition to opinions and feedback from other users they don’t know.
Hopefully, when Facebook rolls out this feature across the site it’ll continue to base trends on newsworthy events being discussed within the community rather than the asinine nonsense users are currently subjected to within the trends section on Twitter.
Facebook has borrowed several features from Twitter over the years, including “@” mentions, verified accounts and the option to follow people.
No word has been given on a timeline for the testing or a full-scale rollout of the Trending Topics system.
Meanwhile, in other news, Facebook today confirmed its Graph Search indexing feature has now rolled out to all members using US English. The feature allows users to find people with similar interests, revisit photos they’ve liked, find recommendations and look for movies and music liked by their friends.
[Via]
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