Facebook
Twitter has become one of the easiest, fastest ways to get and disseminate the news. Facebook wants to change that.
Earlier this year, Facebook launched Trending Topics to help its more than 1 billion users find the news stories that everyone was talking about. Now Facebook is taking that one step further with an update that could make it an easier place to navigate news than Twitter.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it would be releasing Trending Topics on mobile and adding new ways to sort through them. Now, when you click on a topic, you’ll see not only articles, but Facebook posts from users who are “near the scene,” posts from people who are involved in the story in some way, posts from friends and members of groups you belong to, and a live feed of user reactions around the world. You can select which feed you want to view. It seems like a small change, but it addresses a very big problem that Twitter has yet to solve, which is, how do you organize such a constant flow of information?
Twitter has tried to address this issue with hashtags, which you can sort based on things like location, who you follow, and what’s included in the post, and yet, the results lack a certain order. Select results from “people you follow” and you might find a friend’s Tweet below a Tweet from a news outlet below a Tweet from a celebrity. Facebook’s new Trending Topics let people filter by context.
Facebook
While Facebook hasn’t admitted outright that this is a swipe at Twitter’s market, it’s clear that Facebook has the microblogging service in its crosshairs in more ways than one. On Wednesday, Facebook-owned Instagram also tried to drum up some excitement, announcing the app has surpassed 300 million monthly active users. It would be an arbitrary number—big, but arbitrary—except for the fact that it makes Instagram larger than Twitter. And in another unspoken nod to Twitter, Instagram is also launching verified badges for celebrities and public figures.
Facebook is already winning the numbers battle against Twitter. That said, while Twitter’s reputation as a news outlet is already well defined, Facebook’s has been slow to take shape because of how its News Feed is organized. Unlike Twitter, Facebook’s feed is determined by algorithms, which tend to surface content similar to what a given user has clicked on in the past, which can lead to less than comprehensive news. But this new, easy-to-understand approach to Trending Topics could hasten Facebook’s development as a robust news source, and for Twitter, that could be dangerous.
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