You could soon be following Topics instead of Pages.
According to a report by Tech Crunch, they found a “Topics to Follow” box in the News Feed that lets you swipe through a range of themes like Theater, Horror Movies or Photography. Tapping “Follow” brings you to a dedicated feed for that theme populated by a collection of Pages that publish about the topic. You can tap through to see all the Pages you’ll then see public posts from in your main feed.
This sounds a bit like my Feedly feed. Facebook confirms this is a new “small test,” and a spokesperson provided this statement:
“We’re testing ways for people to subscribe directly to topics in News Feed so they can see more stories about topics they like. In addition to following specific Pages, this is a new way to follow the general topics you’re interested in.”
As of now, if it’s looking to be useful, Facebook will keep it; if not, they might ditch that idea.
As of now, there isn’t much topics yet and it seems that Facebook is trying to stir up as little controversy as possible with the topics. However, if it gets rolled out – it could be a very effective way in for allowing people to be informed on some controversial topics with different facts from different sources.
TechCrunch noted that one issue is people might feel duped if they suddenly see a contrarian perspective from an outlet on the far end of the political spectrum that they didn’t realise they’d followed through a Topic.
Twitter tried something a few years back, allowing you to follow a Moment so you’d see tweets about that topic from a range of people without having to find and follow them individually.
As of now, I think I’ll stick to Feedly.
