Facebook is reportedly testing a new "trending topics" section in the United States.
Two months ago, Facebook introduced Hashtags, a feature best known to people using Twitter, and now taking another leaf from Twitter's book, the social network giant is reportedly testing a new "trending topic" section in its newsfeed. The Trending Topics sits on the top, right-hand side of the news feed.
Facebook's new feature was rolled out to a limited number of users in the United States Thursday but the company hasn't officially confirmed the news. However, a spokeswoman for Facebook confirmed the testing of the Trending section Friday, in a statement to Wall Street Journal.
"We are running a small test of a unit on News Feed," she told WSJ. "Right now it is only available to a small percentage of US users and it is still in the early stages of development."
Twitter has long celebrated the success of its "trends box" despite other sites trying to imitate its feature. Services like, Quora, YouTube, Google+ introduced the feature into their services but it never gained the same popularity as on Twitter.
The competition between the two social network giants will intensify if the feature is rolled out on a wider scale. Facebook's integration of hashtags and embedded posts was widely accepted by users. The Mark Zuckerberg-owned company has 1.1 billion monthly active users compared to Twitter's 115 million. So it poses a huge question of whether Facebook will take a lead and promote the Trending Topics feature on its site better than Twitter or the feature will largely remain Twitter's domain.
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