Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

Facebook's Best Feature Yet Could Be Trumped By New Messaging System

Paresh Dave |
November 11, 2010 | 12:45 a.m. PST

Executive Producer

Some Facebook users are beginning to see less cluttered news feeds, and on Monday, all 500 million Facebook users may see sleek new inboxes.

Facebook's best feature yet ties together similar posts into one thread. It's pretty much the same idea as how Facebook earlier this year started grouping together all those "happy birthday!" posts. On your news feed, you would see something like "Joe Bro, Susie Jane and Marco Polo wrote on Jenny Cool's wall for her birthday."

Though i don't have the feature yet, others are reporting that Facebook now expands this to any topic there exists a Facebook page for. A user might see something like "Joe Bro and Susie Jane mentioned Los Angeles Lakers," with both posts threaded below. The move is genius for Facebook and a win for users.

By bringing more prominence to those pages, Facebook keeps users clicking on things. And weaving conversations together increases the number of parties involved the discussion. The end result is people spend more time on Facebook.

For users, it means not having to scroll through an entire news feed of "Go Trojans!" posts or "Obama was here" posts.

As this new feature slowly rolls out, also keep an eye out for an announcement Monday of a new messaging interface that could take a stab at Google's Gmail. It's previously been referred to as Project Titan. There's also some speculation that Facebook may unveil an instant messaging feature for mobile devices to attract more of the 300 million users who don't use Facebook on their mobile phones.

The special event will be followed by a Mark Zuckerberg speech at a separate Web 2.0 summit event later Monday and could be the start of several product announcements during the next few months. Facebook's developers spent all summer working on new features.

Reach executive producer Paresh Dave here. Follow him on Twitter: @peard33.



 

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Comments

Aubrey Garcia (not verified) on November 14, 2010 10:58 PM

This is great news! I can't wait till Facebook is a bit more organized! It will be so much easier finding things.

Your rating: None
Aubrey Garcia (not verified) on November 14, 2010 10:56 PM

This is great news! I can't wait till Facebook is a bit more organized! It will be so much easier finding things.

Your rating: None

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