Is it Possible That The Facebook’s new Newsfeed Voting put Digg out of business?
Even if at this time in the testing stages, Facebook expects to provide a function that will let users to give an opinion on articles in the newsfeed. Facebook’s newsfeed feature engages a special algorithm to display items it it judges will be interesting to a user. The voting function would help users have influence on what is ‘worthwhile’ and should show up in the newsfeed.
It’s much easier to vote on an article by clicking the plus or minus button, versus clicking a link that routes the visitor to an external page. Thus Facebook is expecting that visitors will be more inclined to vote on articles even if they don’t click on them. This will send back very useful data to Facebook, which they may not at present get from users who see something and remark on it in their minds but don’t click on it. At the very least it’ll improve the accuracy of the algorithm, much like Google’s algorithm is constantly improving itself based on user actions.
Currently, ads also get posted on the newsfeed. One believes that the voting system will also permit a visitor to minus the ad and prevent it from surfacing again, including similar ads.
Finally, Facebook can use their voting feature to look across their users to discover what the most voted news stories 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 cross section of members to gather data from and see trends across a large cross sectional group. This feature will sky rocket Facebook’s value by billions, and could decrease Digg’s by several million.
However this ends, as these 2 trend setters of the Web 2.0 world fight it out, there will be a constant supply of digg clones and facebook clones pecking away at their heels, forcing both websites to innovate and generate new ideas.
There is no rollout date so far , but it seems as if it’s imminent, as it is at this time in the beta stages, available to Facebook employees only.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 4:39 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.