8.26 UPDATE – According to Facebook’s Newsroom: “Today, we’re making some changes to the Trending feature on Facebook that will make the product more automated and will no longer require people to write descriptions for trending topics.”

Astute Facebook users (and who amongst us isn’t an astute Facebook user) may have noticed something over to the right of the page design. According to The Huffington Post (and my own eyes), “Facebook is apparently testing a new version of its controversial “Trending” module that removes editorialized blurbs written by staffers of the social network.”

HPost (is that an authorized nickname) goes onto say, “In this version of the Trending module, topics are sorted in a simple list with a number indicating how many people are talking about them. Previously, each of those lines would have been accompanied by a short description written by a Facebook employee ― and no numbers indicating how popular each topic is.”

Not sure why the trending module was ever controversial, but it looks like Facebook is following the Twitter model – – providing the number of Tweets associated with a trending # topic. On Facebook, you can still scroll over the trending term to get a preview/associated video of the story.

Let the outrage, name calling and general disdain begin…  

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