With all of the excitement on Wednesday surrounding Facebook’s release of Timeline for brand pages, the company may have accidentally pushed another feature that wasn’t ready for prime time.
According to Socialfresh, some eagle-eyed users of the social network may have noticed a new option on brands’ Timeline pages. The option suggested that you could add the brand’s page to a list, with the following text:
Start an interest list to see a special news feed of related posts.
The feature didn’t work and was quickly pulled back by Facebook, but here’s what it looked like:
Since the feature has been pulled back, all we can do is speculate about what it might entail at this point. If we are to dissect the text that accompanied the yanked list builder, it seems like Facebook is getting into the curation game ala Pinterest, and Twitter lists to some degree.
Right now the News Feed on Facebook is a mashup of content shared by your friends and messages from brands that you’ve liked. If we take the text literally, Facebook could be working on letting you create a special News Feed view that suggests brands and content to you based on your likes. Since the feature would be completely opt-in, Facebook could suggest brands and people to you that you don’t currently know or even care to know. This would be huge for advertisers on Facebook.
For example, if you have “liked” a company that makes jeans and added that company to a list like this, Facebook could then suggest other brands of jeans and push content to you based on your explicit interest. This would be huge for companies who have daily deals and are looking for buyers to take the plunge in real-time.
If we were to take this a step further, you could set up a myriad of lists based on specific interests of yours and let Facebook decide what content is worth checking out rather than just relying on your friends. If I happen to “like” Dave Matthews Band, I could set up a list and let Facebook drive content to me about the band as well as similar artists. Creating a smart recommendation is no easy task, but Facebook has the engineering firepower and gobs of data to make a run at it.
The good news is that this feature appears to be optional, so it doesn’t look like Facebook will be tossing unexpected content into our News Feed any time soon.
When I reached out to Facebook about the lists feature, I got this reply:
We are constantly testing new products and features, but we have nothing more to share.
If this feature sees the light of day, we’ll all have way more to share.
a lot of the new features seem to be mimicking Twitter in one way or another. Will be interesting to see what they do with this.
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LikeI have been butting fan pages into lists for quite some time now. I strictly use lists to read all the posts that I am interested in at that moment. I no longer use the new feeds to read posts. I have 4 lists for fan pages broken down by different categories.
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whatever facebook might do ..I don't care ..I'm going to use Google+ more and more than facebook.
So Facebook is copying Pinterest just like they did with Google+. How original.
To me it seems more of a "smart hashtag" feature - mimiching the strength of the Twitter hashtag but automatically. I'd use it!
I have all brands in a list for sometime now.
If the speculation becomes reality, this won't be like the current list and page set up. Lists don't curate as this would. FB isn't going to let Pinterest or other curation sites take the market.
I already do this. It is not anything new. As of today I have created 9 lists and broken family and fan pages into various categories. This is how I read all the posts. I do not use the news feeds anymore.
You can already create lists and add pages. I've been doing it for years.
i don´t use any of the new stuff..fb mail, WTF? i m talking with my friends and i like some stuff to get infos..not more.
I think it's a good idea. I don't use facebook solely for the purpose of following my friends inane prattle and pointless soapboxing. There's a bunch of technology and science pages I follow too. in this respect, I've removed any need for Twitter by consolidating all my information into one place. Facebook needs to work on their list functionality in a more effective fashion. It's the one thing google+ is doing better with their 'circles'. If facebook attempted to make lists a more intuitive system I'd erase google+ entirely.
Remind anyone of Google+ circles? ;)
Who likes information overload for God sake?!
SURE!
This is way overdue, not being able to assings pages to lists is [IMO] a major oversight that has been annoying the hell out of me for quite a while.
That's...pinteresting and sparkable
Finally. I msg'd Zuckerberg about this about 2 months ago, maybe he listened :p (coz im the only one smart enough to come up with this idea...)
is this something similar to sparks in google+???
I kinda already have this. "Friend lists not for only friends, etc.
Sure would! Sounds like a great feature (when/if it eventually sees the light of day)
does Facebook think that I don't have anything else better to do with my day? ok, fine...I'll do it