As the battle for social media supremacy continues, each party is under constant pressure to out-do one another with attractive new features. Most recently, it’s the the Facebook vs. Google+ battle that has everyone talking.
For some time now the general sentiment surrounding Facebook has seemed a little negative, a contrast to the positive reception Google+ has received.
For this reason it’s important, now more than ever, that Facebook does all it can to improve it’s user experience and hold on to those who are contemplating jumping ship.
The company is renowned for shaking up it’s features and has been tinkering with it’s newsfeed for years now. It’s latest change comes in the form of related news aggregation.
In an effort to organise the noise in your newsfeed, the new feature essentially groups your friends’ posts together if they are on the same topic, much like it currently does when multiple friends share the same link.
Facebook has started testing the feature with a handful of users so you may already be seeing something similar to this:
Image via Search Engine Land
An official statement from Facebook read, “You may notice some of your News Feed stories are now grouped together by topic. We want to show you the most relevant and interesting information, and this test is designed to show you trends among what your friends are saying.”
Perhaps a more useful feature would be a tool that allows you to filter out posts containing certain keyword groups – “baby”, “Farmville” or “X-Factor” for example.
