Tuesday 9 June 2015

New Trending Feature on Facebook


We all are familiar with the "Trending" section that shows up on the home page of Facebook. This shows all the currently trending news from around the world. As there is a lot of news trending all over, it is not easy to provide users with news that might be important or interesting to the user. The algorithms and machine learning do help Facebook learn what the users interests are, but it can't tell if the user will be interested in something new. Although the algorithms might predict some related stories of interest, it is not certain. I have seen Facebook trying different things to show more of the "Trending" post in the section. In recent past, there was a nice list of topics such as politics, sports, etc., and upon clicking, the section would expand to show related trending news. I thought it was good but it disappeared as many of experimental features do.

A few minutes ago, I saw the same thing appear on my home page. Its back and better than before! They have a nice tab view for different topics and you can easily browse with little movement. Fast, easy and fancy. As always, they have beautiful icons which are familiar to everyone.


Above is the "Trending" section that appeared as a default on my screen. It has news from everywhere and apparently, it is tailored to my interests. Well, most of it I would say. This is what we all saw so far. The tab can be seen on top with different topics of interest.
Below are the screenshots of other sections.







   



Facebook keeps on experimenting, getting feedback and then releasing a feature to everyone. It says almost every Facebook user has been part of the experiment at some point of time and I think that is fair. I don't know how long this new update is going to stay but I hope it remains cause I like how it makes reading more news convenient. You can browse easily and know more of whats happening around the world.