Days ago Facebook announced its trending “new product“, designed to “surface interesting and relevant conversations in order to help you discover the best content from all across Facebook”, ergo, to help us finding important issues and to navigate through them.

Every service will become so alike that we will be tired of them and that will be the time to look for news in other places.

Wait: new product? Wait some more: for us to find out the best contents in Facebook? Wait: to help us all?

It is not a new thing that companies submit functionalities and improvements as a new product, new element, new idea, that, of course, are not news and are not theirs. But this is not the question. Basically now Facebook is saying it pretends to be more Twitter and it is going to show you the trending or more important issues due to your likes, uses and demands. Well, it is not a bad or a good issue, so far it is something I believe in firmly: every service will be so alike that we will be tired and we will look for the news in other places. Instagram will be succeeded; Pinterest will be used, it already is, to impulse advertisings and to link to blogs; Twitter will make up something to pass over the 140 characters without noticing and Google may find the success key without pushing its millions users to jump through hoops.

How it will work and which topics will be trending?

1. Your interests and selection of likes, besides the pages you follow (commercial pages)
2. The authority of people around that topic
3. The news in the issue, or how long it is in Facebook
4. The level of engagement the topic does have

To help us… all? I do not think so

We are not totally surprised yet, but, opposite to other social players, I doubt about it even more if it is in the hands of Facebook. Because is it a well-known issue that Facebook finally does what it feels to, and under a huge and opaque logarythm nobody can translate, it makes us turn back to the 20th century, where you pay for advertising due to the audience, where your contents, though outstanding, only reaches to the 10% of your fans if you are not ready to pay, and where you never ever know, while walking around your wall, if you are passing over something great because you do not know if it is last news, if it is outstanding (nobody understands these groups), but it is a not-paid-for issue.

I would like you to see this video explaining all this wonderfully.

Therefore, and by now, we doubt about, and so much, the use beyond the commercial benefits supposed by communication agencies, that will press their customers with the necessity of investing for your issue or topic to be trending, for it to be advertised in television live programs: “We are trending on Facebook”.

We already have hundreds os articles explaining and adding information about how to work better for these new trending. I recommend the article of Jesse Aaron “Preparing for the New Facebook Trending Feature”, that puts apart one by one every one of those elements regarded by the trending and wisely suggests how to act and which steps you should take.

There will always be for us the choice of the kittens video, the babies video or the fact that fate will turn a video or image of us into something viral.