Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has rolled out a new feature that lets users to look at multiple feeds instead of just a single news feed. The feeds would categorize content from people as well as pages into various topics such as “travel” or “style”. Jason Stein, CEO and founder of social media company, Laundry Service was the first to notice the feature.
Along with the new feeds Facebook is trialing the Marketplace feature. This has been an ongoing work for some months now. Termed as “Shopping”, this particular feature debuted in October but was hidden behind the app’s main section. The Marketplace icon substitutes the Facebook Messenger icon located at the base of the iOS app, thus pushing the “Messenger” icon to the top- neighboring the search bar, just like its position on the Android app. With a mere tap on the icon a shopping page appears where the user can browse and purchase items traded by the different Pages a user has liked.
A Facebook spokesperson said that folks wanted to have new choices to view and have discussion about more articles on the Facebook platform regarding particular topics of their interest. So the company is trialing fields for folk to see different articles from people as well as pages depending on topic areas. Users can get these feeds from Bookmarks placed below Favorites or in a navigation bar below Search.
Since October, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been playing around with an identical feature for its platform. Folk reported viewing a topic’s choice in the sites sidebar that had themes such as “Sports”, Animals & Pets”, “Food” and “Health & Fitness.”During that period nobody noticed this novel feature on Facebook’s mobile version.
The novel feature is just being tested. There is no assurance that these multiple feeds will be offered on a wider scale. Big tech organizations often test fresh features with small number of users to find out which are popular. Many features are dropped as the result of the experiment.
The trial is yet another sign that Facebook wants to fulfill people’s internet requirements totally. It does not see itself as just another social network. Recently, the company has designed its website such that users can view news articles and do shopping without navigating to other sites via features such as Facebook Messenger add-ons, Instant Articles and more.
