Appealing to power users and Twitter loyalists, Facebook today lets users start creating and subscribing to "Interest Lists". You can view updates from these collections of Pages and public figures in a dedicated news feed. They'll be discoverable through suggestions of popular list and those created by friends.
Rolling out over the next few weeks, Interest Lists could give users enough curation ability to follow friends, brands, and thought leaders in the same interface. The release continues Facebook's battle to usurp Twitter's control of the interest graph. The feature combined with Subscribe could be good enough to jeopardize Twitter's long term growth.
Accessed through the home page's left navigation sidebar, Interest Lists can be clicked to switch to a view entirely comprised of stories from a list's members -- Pages and public updates from users with Subscribe enabled. Only the creator can edit a list, and they can select to make it private, or set it as public so it will appear in Facebook's list recommendations to others.
For example, there's general lists created by Facebook such as business, sports, and style, but also specific lists the NFL Teams of teams, athletes, and sports news outlets, and 2012 Presidential Candidates of campaign Pages, candidate profiles, and political news.
Unfortunately, you'll also see the most popular stories from lists you've subscribed in your primary news feed, which you can click through as portal to your lists. However, this will prevent users from adding lists they might only want to check occasionally without polluting their main news feed. I find it very useful to be able subscribe to a niche Twitter list without effecting my feed, and Facebook should considering switching to this functionality or making it an option.
Facebook calls the feature "a new way to keep up with the stuff you care about and tidy up your experience…Interest Lists can help you turn Facebook into your own personalized newspaper." So in addition to targeting Twitter users, the feature could also be aimed at pulling share away from Flipboard, and news aggregators like News.me.
This story originally appeared in TechCrunch.
