The social media giant is now testing a “What friends are talking about” feature, which brings together posts from your friends in a special section of your News Feed. Mashable reports that the feature shows up a little bit down from the top of the News Feed, and it essentially collates all updates from friends.
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As is often the case with such trials, the feature is likely available only to a very limited number of users – so don’t be surprized if it doesn’t show up in your news feed.
The “thumbs up” icon launched in 2009, allowing users show their approval for a friend’s post, even if they didn’t want to comment. So if it knows you like cats, expect to see more feline photos. This feature seems to be heavily inspired by Twitter’s “While you were away” feature that pretty much does the same thing. It’s also not clear whether that’s the case, but the new feature certainly appears to line up with that goal. Users could visit a friend’s page, but there was no way to see updates from their friends or vice-versa. Facebook was initially called as “thefacebook” and had mostly details about a particular friend.
The video will float over the active text conversation that users can continue while viewing the video. For the past several months, the company has been changing news feeds hoping to bring status updates that draw users’ interest closer to the top.
Facebook often tests new features, but there is no surety that they will end being released publicly.
The new version, which relies more heavily on an algorithm than human input, was then rolled out publicly last week.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of News Feed, Mark Zuckerberg posts a special message on his Facebook wall. The idea was that it would promote content posted by the friends and family of users.
Facebook suffered an embarrassing setback in efforts to smarten up the “Trending” news section of the website recently, after a new artificial intelligence system that was meant to improve story selection backfired. Mashable was the first to spot a box marked “What friends are talking about”, which is functional on Facebook’s Android app.
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It is unclear if the “What friends are talking about” feature is related to these changes.
