Can The Facebook’s brand new Newsfeed Voting Render Digg Useless? November 23, 2009
Though at this time in the preliminary phase, Facebook hopes to provide a function that will allow users to vote on items in the newsfeed. Facebook’s newsfeed attraction engages a unique algorithm to call up items it it judges will be appealing to a user. The voting feature would help visitors have control over what is ‘interesting’ and should come up in the newsfeed.
It’s much easier to support on an article by clicking the plus or minus button, versus clicking a link that routes the visitor to a different page. Thus Facebook is anticipating that visitors will be more disposed to vote on items even if they don’t click on them. This will send back 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 don’t click on it. At the very least it’ll improve the usefulness of the algorithm, much like Google’s algorithm is constantly improving itself based on user actions.
Currently, ads also get listed on the newsfeed. One believes that the voting system will also allow a user to minus the ad and keep it from appearing again, including similar ads.
Finally, Facebook can use this voting feature to look across their users to discover what the most voted headlines are – positive and negative. Sound familiar? It’s the precisely same system operating the popular site, digg.com. With an estimated 50 million users, Facebook has a massive pool of members to gather information from and observe trends across a large sample group. This feature will explode Facebook’s value by billions, and could decrease Digg’s by several million.
Whatever the outcome, as these two goliaths of the Web 2.0 industry battle it out, there will be a consistent stream of digg clones and facebook clones pecking away at their heels, forcing both websites to innovate and come up with new ideas.
There is no launch date as yet , but it appears as if it’s imminent, as it is currently in the testing phase, accessible to Facebook employees only.