Facebook wants to expand users' horizons and compete with Twitter. With the new trending feature, the social network hopes to accomplish both.
The site has been testing the feature for several months, and it will soon be part of the top right of a user's newsfeed, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
The product is intended to compete with Twitter's trending topics, a feature that lists the most-mentioned topics in an area and which "hashtags" are popular.
The Facebook trending feature "will include personalized content from around the social network and not just from a member's friends," according to Businessweek.
With the new product, Facebook users will learn more about what's happening in the news instead of just what their friends are up to, Chris Struhar, an engineering manager on the product, told Businessweek.
The trending feature will give users a better sense of what's going on in the world, he said.
"The main thing we have to offer is a scale that no other service can match and that allows us to give a representative view of the world that no other service can offer," Struhar told Businessweek. "Friends will always be at the epicenter of your Facebook experience but we want to help you understand what's happening outside of that friend circle."
Facebook is still far larger than Twitter, boasting more than a billion users, but the site relying on 140-character messages has caught on with users who like to discuss real-time news and events. Twitter has 232 million active users but has never revealed the total number of registered accounts, according to Business Insider.
Facebook users who live in the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain and India should see the new feature on the top right corner of the newsfeeds in the next two weeks, The New York Times reported. The feature should come to other countries and mobile apps soon after.
Struhan told the Times that the Facebook trending feature is intended to be easier to understand than Twitter's list of topics.
"Showing just the topic name, you kind of look at that and say, I don't understand why this thing is trending," he said in an interview.
The product will evolve based on user feedback, Struhan said.
"Our vision for news feed is to become your personal newspaper," he told the Times. "We want to connect you with all the events in the world that you will want to know about."
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