Facebook wants to be a catchall provider for everything from Instagram photos to activity tracking. Next on its list: the news.
The social network has announced a new service called FB Newswire, a regularly updated page with breaking news from around the world intended for journalists and news publications.
The service is backed by the News Corp-owned Storyful, which will aggregate newsworthy content posted by Facebook users and organizations across the world. Through this process, Facebook will effectively crowdsource reports from its users including photos and videos, as well as status updates from users on the ground of newsworthy events.
While Facebook will work to make sure the photos and updates provided by its users are verified by its editorial team, the social network didn't mention anything about privacy concerns.
Instead, the company is focused on ensuring FB Newswire's Twitter account and Facebook page are accurate and reliable.
Catching lightening in a bottle
Although Facebook might be targeting journalists specifically, Facebook already has a 1-billion-plus audience swiping through the day's events on their news feeds. We could see how this service could expand to help the social network report the news directly to its users.
Social networks have served an important purpose in keeping users of in the know during global going-ons, and it seems Facebook is positioning itself to compete even more directly with Twitter as a go-to source for real-time information.
Whereas Twitter has become a news resource organically through users' live tweets, Facebook wants to harness its users; social activity for reports with an extra element of validity.
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