Facebook has certainly shown an interest, if not in becoming an RSS reader as it was previously rumored to be working on, then becoming a new, more uniquely Facebook-kind of news source for its users. Finally revealing some details on how it ranks items in the News Feed Tuesday, the social media giant began on testing "Trending Topics" on a small portion of its vast network Wednesday.
According to AllThingsD, Facebook has begun experimenting with "Trending Topics" - described by AllThingsD's Peter Kafka as a "billboard that highlights things lots of Facebook users are talking about." However, only a small percentage of Facebookers in the U.S. are getting to test the feature, and only on the company's mobile network.
On Tuesday, the social media giant posted an explanation on its blog giving a few details about how its inscrutable News Feed works. The company also announced a tweak to News Feed's ranking algorithm, vowing older posts that still get lots of likes, comments, and attention can now still reappear on the top of the News Feed if the post's popularity isn't waning.
Their research on the new algorhithm said that those so-called organic stories people saw from friends got 5 percent more likes, comments and shares, and the organic stories they saw not from friends received an 8 percent bump in attention. Facebook was also able to increase the number of stories in the News Feed that were read (as opposed to ignored), from 57 percent to 70 percent.
Recently, Facebook made a couple other moves that makes the site better for news reading. (Both changes also, coincidentally enough, made Facebook much more like another social network.) Those changes were the addition of embeddable Facebook posts in the beginning of August and very the Twitter-like "hashtags," added to facilitate "public conversations."
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