Even if currently in the beta stages, Facebook hopes to offer a feature that will allow users to give an opinion on articles in the newsfeed. Facebook’s newsfeed feature engages a unique algorithm to call up articles it thinks will be appealing to a reader. The voting feature would help users have a say in what is ‘worthwhile’ and should show up in the newsfeed.
It’s much simpler to vote on an item by clicking the plus or minus button, versus clicking a link that sends the reader to another page. Thus Facebook is hoping that visitors will be more apt to vote on items even if they don’t click on them. This will send back very useful data to Facebook, which they may not currently get from users who notice 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 constantly improving itself with reference to user actions.
At present, ads also get posted on the newsfeed. One hopes that the voting system will also allow a visitor to minus the ad and prevent it from appearing repeatedly, including similar ads.
Finally, Facebook can use their voting function to get an overview across their users to unearth what the most voted headlines are – positive and negative. Sound familiar? It’s the exact same thing operating the popular site, digg.com. With an estimated 50 million users, Facebook has a large cross section of users to obtain data from and find out trends across a large cross sectional group. This feature will explode Facebook’s value by billions, and could decrease Digg’s by several million.
However this ends, as these two giants of the Web 2.0 world battle it out, there will be a consistent supply of digg clones and facebook clones pecking away at their heels, forcing both companies to innovate and generate new ideas.
There is no launch date so far , but it appears as if it’s imminent, as it is at this time in the testing stages, available to Facebook employees only.