Facebook Groups News Feeds by Topic
August 18, 2011
LifeHackers highlights the new trends and developments in IT in, “Remains of the Day: Facebook’s Grouped News Feed Highlights What’s Popular with Your Friends.”
“Facebook users may soon notice a change in their newsfeeds. The social networking site has begun grouping News Feed stories by topic, allowing users to easily see what stories are popular.”
ZDNet provides more details about the natural language processing that supports the grouped feeds.
It turns out Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates as well as the headlines of posted links to figure out if a topic mentioned has a corresponding Page, and then searches to see if your other friends have done so as well. This helps users quickly see which topics are popular (in Twitter terms, that would be trending topics) amongst their Facebook friends (as opposed to across all of Twitter). It also obviously gives a boost to Pages.
Clearly trying to capitalize on the Twitter concept of trending, grouped news feeds have potential implications to boost ad revenue. Lastly, the feature enables research into a particular individual or topic. Post something on your own page about a politician, for instance, and any subsequent postings by friends will not only group around the original post, but also point to that politician’s personal page as well. In this way, a user could easily follow developments on individuals or organizations of personal or professional interest.
Emily Rae Aldridge, Augsut 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
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