Facebook just announced today, a new tool that enables news organizations to tap into public user conversations and display them online or on TV in real-time. Starting today, the social network company is making available its Public Feed API and the Keyword Insights API to selected medias such as Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC’s Today Show, Slate etc.
The new tools insure media and news organizations better integration of Facebook with their broadcasts. They can display real-time activities about any topic, Facebook said in a blog post.
The Public Feed API displays a real-time feed of public posts for a specific word, while the Keyword Insights API aggregates the total number of posts that mention a specific term in a given period, Facebook added.
The working of these tools are just like Twitter Feed. News channels often use public Twitter messages during their broadcasts.
Only those posts marked as public from Pages and Profiles with the “Follow” option enabled will be available for this stream. That means, if a post is not public it will not be shown.
Keyword Insights API also able to display anonymous, aggregated results based on gender, age and location. A TV show can for instance use this option to include how many people on Facebook talked about a topic and show where they are located while showing if it is most popular among men or women and in which age groups, Facebook said.
The tool will be made available to additional partners in the coming weeks, the spokesperson added.
Facebook also highlighted a few data points about its users to strengthen its case that it is a hub for real-time television chatter. According to Facebook, between 88 and 100 million users log in between 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. — also known as the primetime TV block. In addition, during the Superbowl in February there were 245 million so-called interactions, or actions such as “likes” or comments, related to the event. There were 66.5 million such interactions during the Oscars, the company said.
In the recent weeks, Facebook has been rolling out a series of products to track popular conversations on its platform, including hashtags, embedded posts and trending topics etc. The TheNextWeb points out ‘Even though they are taken from Twitter, Facebook might be better than on Twitter — there aren’t any character limitations, opening it up hearing more significant discussions instead of trying to interpret the statement based on 140 characters.’
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