The company is planning a big announcement for next week

Jun 15, 2013 22:31 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is unveiling something next week. It's not saying, what obviously, but it has invited the press to come and see the shiny new product. Like every time a company makes an invitation like this, the speculation ran wild.

But this time around, there wasn't much to speculate on. There haven't been that many rumors about Facebook products or features for the past few months, especially now that the "Facebook phone" made its debut.

A few days ago though, one developer noticed something interesting in Facebook's source code, mentions of a RSS feed.

This, just as Google is getting ready to pull the plug on Google Reader, claiming that it's just not popular enough.

Plenty of small companies and even the new Digg said they're more than happy to welcome the million of users Reader still has.

But everyone agrees that the market is small and that RSS is long past its prime and has never reached its potential.

So Facebook reviving a decade-old technology seems odd. So it's unlikely that Facebook is unveiling a traditional news reader akin to Google Reader.

However, that's not to say that it's not building a news reader of any sort. In fact, there's been quite a deluge of mobile news readers aimed at keeping users informed without overloading them with news.

Facebook has access to plenty of data on what users read and share and its algorithms are purposely designed to discover the stories that people are most interested in, be them a new song from a favorite band, a friends vacation photos or a news story someone shared.

It should be fairly easy to apply that knowledge to a full news feeds, powered by RSS, and come up with an interesting product. In fact, TechCrunch is convinced that this is what Facebook is launching next week.

Facebook could do some interesting things with news. But the company's track record on the matter hasn't been great. It built a photo sharing app that no one uses around the time it bought Instagram. And it built a video sharing app when it couldn't buy Snapchat.