Facebook nabs Twitter's 'Trending' feature

Latest move looks to enhance its presence in the real-time new game

Facebook is continuing to swipe functionality from other social networks, this time announcing a new “Trending” feature that seems a direct copy and paste of Twitter’s.

The Trending box appears in the top right hand corner of the Facebook website, highlighting certain topics which users are talking about. It’s only available on desktop at the moment but if it proves successful it’s likely to make the jump to mobile at some point as well.

It’s not quite certain how this list will be populated but Facebook says it will be “personalized” and include “based on things you’re interested in and what is trending across Facebook overall”.

“Each topic is accompanied by a headline that briefly explains why it is trending. You can click on any headline to see the most interesting posts from your friends or Pages that are talking about that particular topic,” said Facebook in a blog post announcing the feature.

This is the third time Mark Zuckerberg’s company has found inspiration in Twitter. It previously introduced hashtags to let users tag topics and embeddable posts – two features that the micro-blogging site can be said to have pioneered.

The new feature ties in to the latest rumours that Zuckerberg is planning to launch a newspaper app that aggregates content from various publications. By combining this with the real-time news factor that trending topics promote, Facebook looks like its aiming to become the home of news on the web.