Looks like Facebook might be adding in "voting" options for their news feeds. There are a couple of options that may be added into news feeds around this voting feature, which will let you say whether or not you like certain activity going on in your feeds.

For instance, "vote now" text could show up for a news feed that's showing how many of your friends are fans of a particular facebook app. If you like it, you can indicate just how you feel by voting. Tiny plus and minus links at the end of your feed let you indicate your preference.

I can see how this would be useful for Facebook, and especially useful for ads that may appear in your feeds in the future. Even if advertisers don't want to have these voting options on their ads, they could prove to offer a decent bellwether on how effective ads are. But there's more to Facebook than news feeds. And I fear that the more options and activity that's piled onto newsfeeds, the more task-oriented they become. And that's less fun.

Can we count on Facebook users to vote on a good portion of their news feeds? There are tons of people that don't know all the options and functionality available to them regarding Facebook news feeds, privacy and beyond. And allowing for voting preferences on every item that shows up in a news feed nearly devalues the option in the first place, because there's a lot of stuff that shows up in news feeds that doesn't necessarily need to be voted on. If you change your profile picture, I'm not going to vote on it. Sorry.

Making news feeds more task-oriented is one way of attempting to get users to focus more in the news feeds, and yes, that could be great market research. So if Facebook does roll out the voting options on the larger scale, I'm sure it will be worth it to some extent, for the data gathered from users that take advantage of the new option. If news feed ads get involved, then it will get interesting.

[via valleywag]