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. 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]
