Facebook Interest Lists Will Target Twitter and RSS Feed Readers

Facebook and Twitter essentially do not cross each others paths. Facebook is great for creating a personal network of friends while Twitter seems great to follow trends on current events. Facebook is the bigger company with the bigger numbers and hence it was only a matter of time when it would try to get into trends and the news.

According to a report by Venture Beat, Facebook will soon start rolling out something called Interest Lists. These will allow looking through lists popular lists on that particular topic. The clever part will be these lists will be either something  users can curate by themselves or leave it to their friends and other users to do the curating work.

As you can see in the image above, it Interest Lists will allow users to either create their own lists or subscribe from others. This is a lot like Twitter Lists where users can create their own lists with feeds from different accounts or simply follow other people and their feeds.

Facebook Interest Lists could make RSS Feed Readers Useless?

I love to subscribe to blogs using Google Reader but I see that a growing number of people follow blogs exclusively on social media. I can easily see more people preferring interest lists to follow blogs rather than subscribing to a feed via email or a reader.

I do not think that people like me who use feed readers will quit using readers anytime soon, but does look that feed readers are not going to become more popular than it is already and so its adoption can only go down from here.

What are your views on Facebook Interest Lists? Will it hurt Twitter and kill feed readers? Do drop in your comments.

2 Comments

Rakshit March 9, 2012

IMHO, FB interest lists won’t make much difference to Twitter or Feed readers.

Aditya Kane March 9, 2012

@Rakshit: Any reasons why you feel it wont impact Feed Readers? Because despite its popularity it does not seem to gaining any significant adoption.