Saturday, August 13, 2011

Facebook to Aggregate Topics

Facebook is starting to roll out a feature that will show any particular user when more than one of their Facebook friends is discussing the same topic. While Google’s Circles makes it easy to define people in the ways that you see them, this move from Facebook is more of an automated curation tool.

The reason this matters for content matters is several-fold. First, social media is becoming an important distribution channel for content of all types including brand-focused or brand-created content. The new element is that Google Circles and Facebook's new alerting system will allow users to find discussions and other posts about content of shared interest. That tends to boost the chances that a bit of content can be discovered by more users. Another way of expressing the idea is that the new visibility enhances an audience's ability to aggregate itself.

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