When Facebook first enabled hashtags earlier this year, it seemed inevitable that the social media giant was finding ways to aggregate the data of what its users were posting and commenting about.Today, Facebook started rolling out a new feature called "Trending" which is similar to what sites like Twitter do-surfacing conversation that is happening in your newsfeed that you may normally overlook, while also highlighting topics you are personally interested in and what is happening on Facebook as a whole. And according to Facebook "each topic is accompanied by a headline that briefly explains why it is trending."
This is a unique feature, because unlike Twitter where you might not understand why Paul George is trending (particularly if you don't follow basketball), Facebook will allow you to see why this is a hot topic and pique your interest enough to click to see more about it.
As it begins rolling out in select countries, it'll be interesting to see how they tweak the experience and how users interact with the feature. Probably not a coincidence that it's happening right around awards season, when millions of users are watching a single broadcast and are posting their reactions to dresses, speeches, winners and losers. That is, if the feature is more what is happening now as opposed to recapping what was popular that day.
