Right from our childhood days we have been learning that Change is Necessary for Life and Facebook who is one of the most popular social media platform has always abide by this policy right from its initial days. Now, with the onset of New year, looks like Facebook is again bringing some minor changes in its official mobile application. As per the reports, Facebook is testing multiple, topic-based feeds on its mobile app in place of one main News Feed as a part of a process that was originally started by the company in October when it began allowing some users to see specialized interest feeds on the web.
The new mobile design is way too similar to its another popular app called Paper app. This app automatically sorts out the posts from people and pages they follow into different sections or feeds. As per the reports, this new update won't disable the traditional News Feed, but it is supplemented with a set of secondary feeds categorizing the content into different sections like - Style, Travel, Headlines accessible with a simple swipe.
When Facebook was asked to throw some light on this new update, a spokesperson said, People have told us they'd like new options to see and have conversations about more stories on Facebook around specific topics they're interested in. So we are testing feeds for people to view different stories from people and Pages based on topic areas.
Another important update which Facebook is rumored to be working on from past few months is the concept of Marketplace feature also called "Shopping". This feature was first tested in the month of October but was buried behind the main section of the app. However, recently received screenshots (sent by reader Andrew Watts) show the Marketplace tab featured more prominently.
However, aforementioned UI changes have been confirmed by Facebook who also adds that these changes would be accessible only by a small percentage of people in the US for now and that its global rollout is quite far. Another spokesperson added, The experience will continue to evolve as we learn more about what’s useful for people and effective for businesses. We’re still in the early stages of testing and will continue to update the experience as we learn more about what works best.
Talking about the Marketplace tab, it also features sale groups that the user has joined, and the user has been given the ability to search for any item that are for sale across all the pages and groups. Though this Marketplace isn't a full competitor to Craiglist, however giving a billion users the ability to search nearby items for sale without joining groups or liking pages can definitely give Facebook an undue advantage over Craigslist.