While at this time in the beta stages, Facebook hopes to serve up a feature that will let consumers to vote on items in the newsfeed. Facebook’s newsfeed attraction uses a special algorithm to call up pieces it thinks will be attractive to a user. The voting feature would help people have a say in what is ‘interesting’ and should come up in the newsfeed.
It’s much easier to vote on an item by clicking the plus or minus button, as opposed to clicking a link that routes the visitor to an external page. Thus Facebook is anticipating that visitors will be more inclined to vote on articles even if they don’t click on them. This will provide very valuable information to Facebook, which they may not at present get from visitors who see something and remark on it in their minds but neglect to click on it. Basically it’ll increase the accuracy of the algorithm, much like Google’s algorithm is always fine-tuning itself with reference to user actions.
At present, ads also get listed on the newsfeed. One hopes that the voting system will also allow a user to minus the ad and keep it from surfacing repeatedly, including similar ads.
Finally, Facebook can use their voting function to look across their users to unearth what the most voted headlines are – positive and negative. Sound familiar? It’s the precisely same system operating the popular site, digg.com. With over 50 million users, Facebook has a large market share of users to gather data from and discover trends across a large cross sectional group. This feature will increase Facebook’s value by billions, and could decrease Digg’s by several million.
Whatever the outcome, as both of these 2 giants of the Web 2.0 world battle it out, there will be a constant stream of digg clones and facebook clones pecking away at their toes, forcing both companies to be more creative and come up with new ideas.
There is no rollout date as yet , but it appears as if it’s imminent, as it is at this time in the beta stages, available to Facebook employees only.
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