back to article Facebook gets a 'trending topics' box (just what its cluttered pages need)

Facebook is rolling out a new "service" in the form of a Trending box in the top righthand corner of user's home page, which highlights topics that have recently proved popular. Trending Less space for you "The list is personalized, including topics based on things you’re interested in and what is trending across Facebook …

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  1. Old Handle
    Alert

    Attention all English-speaking humans

    Trending means "going in a direction". If you mean "currently popular", the word you were looking for is trendy. If you think that sounds too frivolous, you are probably correct. Maybe you should stop talking about it all together.

    1. T. F. M. Reader
      Headmaster

      Re: Attention all English-speaking humans

      Hmm... I checked the OED and was surprised that the relevant definition was "be popular or the cause of much discussion on a news or social media website". I have always thought that "trending" was normally used with a direction specified (OED example: "unemployment is trending upwards"), and until now I understood the social media "trending" to mean "growing in popularity (fast?)" rather than just being popular.

      I bow to the authority of OED but Old Handle gets an upvote, anyway.

      1. Tom 38
        Headmaster

        Re: Attention all English-speaking humans

        "Trending" is a horrific verb in my opinion. It is much better to be explicit - "The trend in unemployment is to grow" - especially with the recent trend to omit the direction of the trend, with an implicit understanding that it is growing.

  2. G 14

    Shark well and truly jumped, almost out of air and drowning.

    1. Valeyard

      but if it was the shark doing the jumping then the fonz would've been in a lot more trouble..

  3. Steve Brooks

    Well won't affect me, the last time I went to my own facebook page intentionally...never!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Steve Brooks 01:48

      "Well won't affect me, the last time I went to my own facebook page intentionally...never!"

      So? Shouldn't you be tweeting this kind of irrelevant stuff?

      1. Steve Brooks

        Re: @Steve Brooks 01:48

        Why when people like you are waiting here all agog to hear it?

        But seriously, I have a facebook account because ppl were putting stuff they wanted me to see on facebook, and whenever I went to look at it facebook told me I needed an account to view it...sigh!

        Now lets go to my facebook page intentionally (for the first time ever) and see what's there! Nope nothing except two people who I have never heard of want to be my friend, whoohoo, no sorry, wrong phrase, to many o's and w's and not enough u's, c's, k's and f's. Guess I am not contributing much to facebooks's business model!

  4. dssf

    I won't see the trending in a meaningful timeline/time frame

    I only go on 1 time every 30-40 days, dip in and out for 10 minutes once a day from Fri to Sun. Told my friends to contact me by my email address if it's important to reach me.

    I wonder when fb will start scanning for such heresy and "de-trend" that from walls to keep other "friends" and contacts from following suit.

    Maybe they should add a "DEtrending: your friends who don't replay to you because you don't reply to the, time-relevant to a post you made... DEtrending: youor friends who have not signed in for over 25 days... Won't you PLEASE stir the pot and get them back to daily signing in? PLEEEEEZE"

    Unlike some social sites, fb won't tell you the contents of the messages your friends sent to you (as far as I can tell) because fb's relevance NEEDS us to sign in daily, preferably staying signed in so they can crawler-track us better than when we're signed out or using obfuscators.

    The Register is a lot more entertaining to me, asided from some broken English some of my overseas friends use. I wish I could INTENTIONALLY break English the way an ESL user does. It's "refreshing", since it makes me re-think about English. Fb used to be my neck-rasping vampire, sucking off of my limited time to the tune of aorund 6 hours a day during my first 5 years in it. Having China cut the cord, and being in Shanghai a month, and not being successful getting a post-entry VPN to work, China showed me I *COULD* *DO* *IT*: wean myself off of fb. It was a shocking withdrawal. That is probably the best thing China has to date done for me. De-addicted me from fb.

  5. dan1980

    No explanation needed

    "Each topic is accompanied by a headline that briefly explains why it is trending."

    I looked at the image and saw no such thing. It has a short blurb about what the story is but no explanation of why that story/article is 'trending'.

    Not that is matters, but if it said "lots of people forwarded this to everyone they know because they are vacuous and bored and base in equal measure and photos of celebrities being fat make them feel superior, stories of world events make them feel intelligent and images of cats help them forget that their lives are depressing failures by any objective reckoning" then that would help explain why something is 'trending'.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No explanation needed @dan1980

      "Not that is matters, but if it said "lots of people forwarded this to everyone they know because they are vacuous and bored and base in equal measure and photos of celebrities being fat make them feel superior, stories of world events make them feel intelligent and images of cats help them forget that their lives are depressing failures by any objective reckoning" then that would help explain why something is 'trending'."

      dan1980 in "Hypocrisy on Reg forum" shocker ...

      1. dan1980

        Re: No explanation needed @dan1980

        It is only hypocrisy if I am pretending that I am not vacuous too and my own life isn't the great screaming mess that it really is; that I am happy and healthy and sober rather than a bipolar alcoholic who alternately refuses and abuses medication; that I am something more than a wasted youth and an abdicated adulthood, more than an emotionally besieged coward trying to hide from the past, hold back the future and somehow make it through today. More than a loveless reprobate with just enough blessings in my life to realise how badly I have squandered them.

        But I'm not.

        Have an upvote anyway. Whoever you are.

        d.

  6. Big-nosed Pengie

    Social Fixer

    Thank JehovaJesus for it. It removes that and many other abominations.

  7. Mark 85
    Thumb Down

    Oh dear lord... it'll be filled with cats.

  8. JDX Gold badge

    When you say "new" and "rolling out"...

    ... do you mean the feature which has been around for weeks at least? There were dozens of pages about how to turn it off in 2013...

  9. Valeyard

    Today's trending topics

    •share if you love your daughter

    •like this to cure cancer

    •This little girl is sick. 99% of my friends won't repost this but some will

    •<your hot friend has put up a particularly busty profile picture and it has 200 likes in a minute>

  10. Pat 11

    what's trending is...

    Teens leaving in droves. Soon fb will be entirely populated by people who work in hr.

  11. ukgnome

    I guess trending is a trend

  12. Alex Wilson

    I've been using FB Purity to turn all this crap off for years!

    Facebook is surprisingly useful once you turn all the crap off...

    The guy who develops the addon is pretty good, regular updates and some pretty clever features.

    http://www.fbpurity.com/

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    > Each topic is accompanied by a headline that briefly explains why it is trending

    It was a quick feature to implement:

    cout << "Because too many twats clicked 'Like'";

    (but got held up in translation after Texans objected to the use of "fanny")

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And another...

    ...positive-feedback circuit closed...

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