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Facebook Is Testing Second News Feed With A New ‘Explore’ Tab
(Mar 03 2017 at 05:33pm)Brace yourselves. Facebook is testing a second news feed, and If you are one of those who can’t stand the content showcased on their feed, then this move might boost your worry. In the beta version of Facebook for Android, some users have spotted the new feature. Not just Android users, a similar feature was also detected by iOS beta testers some time back.
So, here is how the second news feed works – Your current new feed remains intact in the “Home” tab while the second one makes its way through the new “Explore” tab. The second tab is a blend of videos, photos, and other media that might peek your interest. However, it is worth noting that Facebook does not curate this content from pages that you have already liked or followed, but it does puts your interests in context. It brings us to deliberate that this could be Facebook’s gimmick to push paid marketed pages to the new audience on a larger scale.
Moreover, we can compare this second news feed with Instagram’s Search and Explore tab. The content shown on the second news feed is similar to the pages that you have liked or the kind of articles that you generally read on Facebook. Also, the content shown is also based on the video, article, or memes popular among your friends on Facebook.
In all, the Explore tab looks like a new method to engage the audience with new pages and media. The design of the Explore tab is to increase video consumption among users. This new tab is far from being personalized and would only cater the set of audience who want to explore new content and pages. Explore tab can be conveniently put under Facebook’s many experiments that it conducts to enhance its usability.
The Explore tab has been spotted several times by both Android and iOS testers, which means that Facebook could soon roll it out officially. If the social media giant finally ends up adding it to its mobile app and desktop site then it would be pretty interesting to see how users take it. Recently, Facebook-owned WhatsApp went through an interface makeover with the new
Snapchat-like “Status” feature that failed to garner positive feedback from the users. Now that Facebook seems to be gearing up for second news feed element, it remains to be seen if users take it well.
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