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Even if at this time in the beta stages, Facebook hopes to serve up a feature that will permit consumers to give an opinion on articles in the newsfeed. Facebook’s newsfeed feature uses a special algorithm to call up items it thinks will be attractive to a reader. The voting function would help users have influence on what is ‘interesting’ and should come up in the newsfeed.

It’s much easier to vote on an article by clicking the plus or minus button, as opposed to clicking a link that routes the visitor to an external page. Thus Facebook is expecting that visitors will be more apt to vote on items even if they don’t click on them. This will provide very valuable information to Facebook, which they may not currently get from users who see something and think in their minds but don’t click on it. Basically it’ll increase the usefulness of the algorithm, much like Google’s algorithm is constantly fine-tuning itself with reference to user input.

At present, ads also get listed on the newsfeed. One hopes that the voting system will also allow a visitor to minus the ad and prevent it from appearing repeatedly, including similar ads. 

Finally, Facebook can use their voting function to look across their users to find out what the most voted news stories are – positive and negative. Sound familiar? It’s the precisely same system operating the popular site, digg.com. With over 50 million users, Facebook has a massive market share of members to gather information from and find out trends across a large sample group. This feature will explode Facebook’s value by billions, and could reduce Digg’s by several million.

However this ends, as both of these two goliaths of the Web 2.0 environment battle it out, there will be a consistent supply of digg clones and facebook clones pecking away at their heels, forcing both companies to innovate and come up with new ideas.

There is no release date as yet , but it appears as if it’s imminent, as it is at this time in the testing phase, available to Facebook employees only.