Los Angeles — In its pursuit to take on popular microblogging site Twitter head-on, social media monopolist Facebook over the weekend said it is tinkering with a Twitter-like feature called “Happening Now,” which displays current status updates, likes and other FB activity from friends as they happen in real-time on the social network.
The Happening Now feature is being tested by a “fraction of a percent” of Facebook’s more than 600 million members, according to the world’s leading online social media giant. However, the main difference here is that it is not the main news feed, which should keep users from having a failure about the changes.
The real-time update feature, which holds resemblance to Twitter’s friend feed, is seen by some as a potential challenge to global microblogging outfit Twitter, which lets people share what they are thinking, doing, or seeing instantly in messages of 140 or fewer characters.
“We are currently experimenting a feature within News Feed that provides people with the ability to view what their friends are commenting on and ‘liking,’ as these actions are being performed on Facebook,” the California company said in an email reply to an AFP inquiry.
From what we can evaluate from our limited vantage point, “Happening Now” provides Facebook users with automatic updates about what their friends are doing on the social network, like adding pictures, “Liking’ posts or editing their profiles. “In the coming weeks, as we gain more insight from this experiment, we will keep making improvements and may expand it to more people.”
Moreover, this dazzling new feature was first publicly discovered by Amit Misra, a writer for Dazeinfo. He noticed the feature when he logged in to Facebook, but was not initially sure whether he was supposed to be seeing the change.
“At this point of time, I am also not sure whether this is a world-wide release or roll-out will be in phases for millions of users as traditional process of Facebook,” writes Misra. “However, I must pat Facebook for making cool ‘News Feed’ section pretty impressive, simple and attractive.”
Furthermore, the ‘Happening Now’ sidebar is displayed in a column to the right of the primary news feed, duplicating much of that content in shorter form, as shown in the (screenshot below). It is located where the “Upcoming Events” section normally appears. When a user clicks on an update from there, it brings up a window that includes more information without leaving the feed. At present, most users see a list of upcoming events, recommended Pages, ads and pokes.
Here is a screenshot from AllFacebook:
It is still not clear whether the updates on the sidebar have character limits, a la Twitter, but the resemblance to the Twitter feed is unmistakable. However, in its current form, “Happening Now” does not appear to be much of a threat to Twitter, but rather an cool bonus for the social media fans that adds some much-needed real-time action to the News Feed. But ultimately, there is no telling if this will actually become a feature beyond the test.