Facebook introduced a new “Trending” section on the web in January to display trending stories that are frequently shared and discussed on the social network. Today, the company announced that it has improved this feature by organizing trending topics into five categories so that it’s easier for people to explore stories from different sources.
Facebook gets a lot of flack for copying Twitter features like Trending Topics, but today it’s evolving its version now on Android and web, and coming soon to iOS. Each trend is divided into five sections: News articles, a “Live Feed” of real-time chatter, posts by people “In The Story”, posts from people “Near The Scene”, and post from friends and Groups you’re in. The new sectioned Trending Topics on web and mobile replace Facebook’s old news outlet-heavy topics that felt a bit sterile, but help sift important posts out of the endless mentions you’d find in a Twitter search. Trending Topics product manager Andrew Song tells me “There’s a ton of content on Facebook. We want to make it easy for people to find these perspectives.”
