The upcoming death of Google Reader and the addition of hashtags [for Facebook advertisers beginning this week] signal Facebook will likely launch a new way to discover and read news at the June 20th press event it’s just sent out mysterious invites to. It could be a sort of ‘trending articles on Facebook’ feature, or a more full-blown RSS reader-style product. Either could take advantage of Facebook’s massive treasure trove of aggregate data on what people share to surface popular and personally recommended news articles. The event invite, first spotted by Joanna Stern of ABC News, says ‘A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.’ The conspicuously analog invite was sent out via paper snail mail instead of by email like Facebook usually does. There’s also a coffee stain on the invite. You know where else you find coffee stains? On the newspaper, while you’re reading it, over coffee.
Nobody knows what Facebook knows . Since most users share semi-privately, it can’t be scraped for trending topics. But Facebook’s algorithms see all. Similar to how it offers ad targeting data in anonymous aggregate, Facebook could surface what articles are being shared most frequently across its user base without violating privacy.
… The product is likely to take advantage of hashtags that Facebook users can now add to posts to help its algorithms understand what topics different news articles are about. When I asked Facebook about what more it could do with its data on what people share, it [referred] me to the hashtag announcement from earlier this week. That blog post notes[:] ‘Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations.’
… A Facebook news reader with RSS would come at a perfect time, just two weeks before Google shuts down Google Reader for good.
