Facebook Makes It Easier To Get Its Social Content To Screens

May 1, 2014 by Dave Haynes

Much of the social media visualization done in digital signage has focused on Twitter feeds and particularly hash tags, but Facebook has released a new API that is intended to draw some of the attention to its own social streams.

The Trending, Topic Insights, Topic Feed, and Hashtag Counter APIs were announced Wednesday by Facebook’s Public Content Solutions division.

The APIs contain these elements:

• Trending – The Trending API exposes a list of depersonalized trends that people are currently talking about on Facebook.
• Topic Insights – The Topic Insights API provides aggregate anonymized insights about people mentioning a certain topic.
• Topic Feed – The Topic Feed API lets you search for any topic and see a ranked feed of public posts about that topic.
• Hashtag Counter – The Hashtag Counter API lets you count the number of times a specific hashtag has been used within a certain timeframe.

There is also an Instagram API for snapshot feeds.

The attraction for Facebook is that enabling this gets more digital and broadcast media theoretically referencing the Facebook fire hose, whereas right now you are much more likely to see references to “Here’s what’s trending on Twitter …”

I’ve no idea whether this capability side-steps or runs smack into the intellectual property that Monster Media is now actively protecting with respect to displaying aggregated social media feeds. When Monster acquired LocaModa, it acquired US patent  8,615,565: “Automatic content retrieval based on location based screen tags,” which relates to the automatic retrieval and display of social media on location-based screens such as Out-of-Home networks and signage at venues, events and arenas.

The only company I see on the current list of partners, that plays in the digital signage sandbox, is Array Interactive.