Move over, Twitter. Facebook is introducing its own Trending feature that shows popular stories that are being actively discussed amongst all of Facebook’ss 1.3 billion users. The application keeps users up to date with breaking news on topics like sports, politics, and entertainment. Unlike Twitter however, Facebook is foregoing the popular hashtag that people use to search topics.
This new Trending widget will appear in the top right hand corner of the user’s newsfeed, and will display the top three topics that are relevant right now. Clicking on these topics will show the user all the things that their friends and other sources are saying about it. In addition, Facebook Trending will be tailored to suit the user’s personal interests as well as what is trending across Facebook overall.
Trending competes with the hashtag on a more functional level by telling the user what’s trending followed by a short snippet that offers more content. With Twitter, users are left to surmise why a keyword is trending and has to pull information from reading several tweets- arguably less intuitive than Facebook’s approach
Currently, this feature will be makings its first appearances in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, India, and Australia over the next few weeks. It expects to be rolled out to other countries and on mobile on a later date.
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