Facebook has introduced a more powerful version of its trending tool for mobile, which keeps users up to date with the most popular stories and topics of the day.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) product manager Andrew Song claims that the new layout is more organized, separating the trending topic into news stories, posts from your friends, photos and posts made close to the site of the event, for example photos uploaded from the Eric Garner protests in New York.
Facebook’s trending feature: A move to mobile
After debuting the Trending feature back in January, Facebook appears to be aiming at incorporating some of the features of Twitter into its feed. The layout of the rival social network has proven popular with avid news readers, who even take to the network to tweet news in real time.
Facebook has not admitted that it is explicitly targeting any rival social network, but the layout has some clear similarities with that of Twitter. The new structure improves on the old Facebook layout where all the information on a trending topic was presented haphazardly.
This is the second Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) update of the week which adds a feature to its mobile service. Graph Search for mobile was announced on Monday, two years after its release for desktop users. Although the company claims to prioritize mobile users, the introduction of both Graph Search and Trending for mobile long after desktop would appear to contradict this.
Potential for growth
Desktop users will be able to enjoy the new Trending layout from this Wednesday onward, with an Android update due to arrive in a few weeks time. Song claims that the company is working on an iOS update too, although he did not specify an expected release date.
The aim of the update is to enable users to fully explore trending stories from a variety of sources. Since its introduction the Trending feature has performed well for the company, and introducing an improved version for mobile opens it up to the majority of users, who access the network from a mobile device.
It will be interesting to see if Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) users increasingly interact in the same way as Twitter users currently do, given the improvements to the Trending feature.
