Though at this time in the testing phase, Facebook hopes to offer a function that will let consumers to give an opinion on articles in the newsfeed. Facebook’s newsfeed feature engages a unique algorithm to call up articles it it judges will be interesting to a reader. The voting feature would help visitors have influence on 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, as opposed to clicking a link that routes the user to another 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 provide very useful data to Facebook, which they may not currently get from users who notice something and remark on it to themselves but neglect to click on it. Basically it’ll improve the accuracy of the algorithm, much like Google’s algorithm is constantly fine-tuning itself based on user input.
At present, ads also get listed on the newsfeed. One believes that the voting system will also permit a user to minus the ad and prevent it from surfacing repeatedly, including similar ads.
Finally, Facebook can use their voting feature to get an overview across Facebook to unearth what the most voted headlines are - positive and negative. Sound familiar? It’s the precisely same feature running the well known site, digg.com. With over 50 million users, Facebook has a massive market share of users to harvest data 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.
However this ends, as both of these 2 giants of the Web 2.0 industry fight it out, there will be a consistent stream of digg clones and facebook clones nibbling away at their heels, forcing both companies to be more creative and come up with new ideas.
There is no launch date so far , but it appears as if it’s imminent, as it is currently in the testing phase, accessible to Facebook employees only.
