Facebook is not working on an
RSS product, we hear, but it still has a huge and truly social opportunity in news discovery. Facebook could turn what links we share with friends into an automatic Digg for the world.
Over a billion people are on Facebook, and many share links to news stories and offsite content along with their commentary. Yet rather than post publicly like on Twitter, most posts are shared semi-privately with friends and acquaintances.
Right now there’s no way for people to gleam the collective opinion of Facebook users on what’s important. Only Facebook’s algorithms sees what the most popular links and words are across the entire social network. If
Facebook took data on what people shared and used it in a privacy-safe, anonymous, aggregate form, it could create a list of the world’s most popular web pages at any given moment.
Conveniently linked to from the Facebook home page and mobile app,
the list could become an an informative and addictive window it our collective consciousness.
Coding On The Shoulders Of
Giants
There are places to get a peek into what the world is sharing or interested in today, but none with Facebook’s data set or mainstream user base.
Reddit is amazing. It’s a wildly diverse community of people picking the
day’s most important content across a near-limitless array of categories. Their votes surface what’s most interesting, and their voices are arranged into intelligible threads and conversations.
It’s threaded design is so good, in fact, that I think we’ll see other less-formatted comment systems move towards Reddit’s style
with time.
You could argue whether it’s an
advantage or disadvantage, but Reddit is based on active submissions. For something to appear on Reddit, someone must have the initiative and take the time to purposefully post it. Once there, it’s only the Redditors who vote and comment that determine
a post’s rank. That makes what tops Reddit’s homepage more of a reflection of the Reddit community than the web as a whole.
Sure, there are R/’s for everyone, but as a whole, Reddit carries a bit of a proudly nerdy attitude mixed with doses of skepticism and humor.
Facebook’s opportunity comes from the potential to scan everything shared on it and use a wider, more mainstream definition of popularity to rank a list of what’s interesting. No one would
have to actively vet the list. It would simply evolve organically based on how frequently things were shared on Facebook, and maybe how many clicks, likes, and comments they received. Offering lists by country or international region could make sure the content is somewhat localized.
Twitter Trending Topics
The Facebook news discovery experience I’m imagining shares some
similarities with Twitter’s Trending Topics. It too doesn’t have to be actively vetted by users. People just go about their days tweeting, and popular words and hashtags bubble to the top of the list. But do you find yourself addicted to checking Twitter’s
trending topics? No. At least I sure don’t. They can be briefly shocking or amusing but they rarely teach me much or spur me to click. 3.49.40 PM” src=”http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/screen-shot-2013-06-30-at-3-49-40-pm.png?w=399″ width=”239″ height=”198″ />
Twitter Trends don’t even have their
own web page. They’re just stuck on the left rail of Twitter’s home page. On mobile they’re lumped into the Discover tab. In what I see as their critical shortcoming, they have no context. No way to understand why they’re being shared. Clicking them simply opens a
search for that word or hashtag, which can produce results that are a mess, tough to decipher, and don’t provide any definitive answer to what the trend is about. For obvious things like sporting events and huge international news, these streams can offer a fascinating insight into what the world is thinking. But even a Google search
couldn’t quickly tell me that #FOTunis referred to the Freedom Online conference in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. Organizing news
discovery around individual words or short phrases doesn’t seem very efficient or easy…at least not with this design or without context.
If Facebook centered a news discovery product around links, it could make it much clearer what people are discussing. Links typically come with some combination of a headline, a photo, and some text that can be used as a blurb. All Facebook would need
to do is show a list of links with this info, just like it does when you websites to the news feed, and people could get the pulse of the planet in a quick skim.
While we’re on the topic of Facebook
hashtags, signs indicate the company will eventually create a list
of trending hashtags. Facebook
launched hashtags, similar to Twitter’s, earlier this month, and on Thursday launched Related
Hashtags, which displays other tags frequently added to the same post as a hashtag you’ve searched for or clicked on. I believe Facebook is rolling the hashtags product out slowly so it
can learn to slice and dice the data in order to create a trending hashtags product.
FaceDigg
Let’s be clear. A Facebook news reading product wouldn’t replace Reddit or Twitter, or necessarily even compete with them directly. But it could take the theme of surfacing what people care about, make it less subjective, and house it in an easy to use and accessible design. I personally think I would visit this “Facebook Trends” page frequently. Whenever I read through my news feed and started
getting bored, I could click to it for inspiration. I’d skim through it, clicking through to different links and then going back to Trends page for more. If it had lists based on geography, or a
personalized list that tuned itself to my behavior, interests, and what people similar to me enjoy, I might visit even more. From Digg to Reddit to 9Gag to Techmeme, great lists of trending content have proven addictive.
Yet there hasn’t been one with a truly mainstream focus.
If Facebook nailed this, it could generate a ton of traffic. I think some people would click to refresh it and see what’s happening in the world often — almost as often as they read the news feed for content from their friends. The two could be seen as parallel pillars of information — that which is interesting specifically to you, and that which is interesting to everyone. Private and public. Subjective and objective.
A Facebook trending links section could also spark high quality conversations within Facebook. If it shows me something that resonates with me, I might not just click, but
share and talk about it with my friends. Ideally, if friends had already shared it, I’d see that and the conversations that followed in-line on the trends list.
Facebook already has a nifty way of
doing this in the most recent design of the news feed. It shows a stack of profile pictures next to a shared link and you can hover over each to see how that friend described the content and what their friends replied. Using that design for Trending Links my
friends had already shared could be a great alternative to one long, messy comment thread of strangers.
If you’re thinking “I don’t need this. My friends already share great links and clue me in to what’s happening in the world”, you’re lucky, and you’re
probably in the minority. Remember that the average user had around
180 to 250 friends last I heard. I worry that great swaths of Facebook’s user base, especially in emerging markets and countries where the service bloomed later, are missing out on one of the great joys of the social web — the instant, collective conversation surrounding the day’s news, tragedies, and triumphs. It would just take one person perusing Facebook Trends to enlighten an entire social cluster. Since there aren’t real character limits
on posts, and comment threads are clearly displayed, people would
have plenty of room to voice dissenting opinions about the world’s most popular links. In that way, Facebook’s format and the way it diverges from Twitter could keep it from becoming an echo chamber. In fact, the aggregated “5 friends shared this link” design makes it quick to view a variety of perspectives on a piece of content.
With any discovery medium comes opportunities to monetize through
sponsored placement. Brands could pay to have their links inserted within the list of trending links. This could become a premier channel for content marketing. Traditional ads might not work there, but links to branded content or apps, fun marketing stunts,
or contests could do well when not jammed into the news feed where
they don’t quite fit with organic content from friends. Top-tier advertisers have been pushing Facebook for ways to reach large audiences all at once, and this could be the ticket.
If Facebook wants to house our digital lives, it can’t just be about who we are
and what we’ve done. It must also encompass what we think, and to get us to volunteer our thoughts, it should strive to inform us, inspire us, and seed our discussions with friends by surfacing what’s popular around the globe.
[Image
Credit: Brian
Shaler]
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