Facebook, Inc. wants a slice of the attention Twitter, Inc. gets from journalists with a new service that makes content discovery on the uber-social network far more accessible.

Called Facebook Signal, the new service allows journalists, writers, bloggers, whatever badge they apply to themselves, to search through Facebook to surface relevant trends, photos, videos, and posts on Facebook, and notably Instagram as well, for use in their writing and reporting.

According to the spin about the service from Facebook, Signal allows journalists who want to source, gather, and embed newsworthy content from Facebook and Instagram, across news, culture, entertainment, sports, and more, to be served that content in the one place.

The service allows users to monitor trending topics and then display content related those topics from both people and Facebook Pages for more details, or what Facebook describes as “deeper context” on those trends.

Of particular note, results are delivered “unranked and in chronological order,” a subtle dig by Facebook at Twitter’s default search view, and search functionality is said to make it easy to surface content directly related to a story or topic the user is tracking.

Other features of the service include the ability to access lists of public figures ranked by who is being mentioned the most on Facebook, and perhaps more functionally interesting for those who write for a living, the ability to search Instagram for visual content surrounding news events around the world using location-tag and topic-related search.

Nice in theory

It does look like a decent service, but if you’re outside the United States this what you get when you try to sign up.

So to be fair, given the inability to actually try it out, it does sound nice in theory, but it should be noted that this isn’t an act of a company endeavoring to deliver corporate benevolence, but one who wants links, and lots of links in the form of embeds.

For all of Twitter’s considerable issues, the ability to have their content used and shared on other sites isn’t one of them, and Facebook want’s a bigger slice of that pie.

Instagram, in particular, is ripe for this form of sharing, particularly given embeds, rightly or wrong, allow the sharing of images while bypassing any serious copyright considerations.

If you’re in the United States and want to sign up for the service, you can do so here, if you’re not in the United States, it may or may not be available to you at some point in the coming years.

Image credits: Facebook