Facebook Signal is the latest attempt by the social network to lend a helping hand to journalists in its efforts to become the source of breaking news and what’s trending. A year ago, it would have been easy to dismiss its labors to grab Twitter’s reputation for attracting the hottest stories, as a toothless endeavor. But Facebook has lately become a much more formidable competitor to the micro-blogging website.
Journalists keen on gathering the freshest and most happening news based on their popularity, can now sign up for Signal for Facebook and Instagram, in addition to staying glued to their Twitter feeds. It’s far too early to say whether the feature will work as well as intended. But it does hold promise and reveal Mark Zuckberg’s unrelenting ambition to make Twitter take the MySpace route. If that ever happens, we’ll eat our favorite bow-tie and post a video of it on YouTube.
Facebook Signal is essentially a discovery and curation tool. It shows users trending topics and lets them dig deeper by checking out content related to these stories shared publicly by Pages or people. The results display will not be ranked in any way and will simply be shown based on when they were posted. There’s a handy search bar too and an option to find out which public figures are being mentioned the most on the social network, in the form of a leaderboard.
The feature also enables searching through Instagram for content by topic or location. Facebook Signal is just one of the company’s calculated moves to grow into the biggest name for news as well as social networking. Before this, it had unveiled Instant Articles to tempt publishers to post news directly on its site. And more recently, there was the Mentions app for those wishing to broadcast content only to their public followers.