But recently, the company stepped up efforts to refine the Facebook News Feed–the primary means of using Facebook on mobile phones-for use on slow connections.
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Now the News Feed selects content that is easier and faster to load, such as text articles or posts, when the Internet connection is weak.
While plenty of us can take advantage of the 4G LTE connections, Facebook takes into consideration that a majority of the population still runs the 2G or 3G. “So if you are reading a post from your friend about their weekend, but doing so on a slower connection, we will load more stories while you’re reading so they are ready for you when you’re done reading that post”. “In order to make sure another billion people can connect using Facebook we need to design features of the product that work seamlessly regardless of mobile network and device”, Chris Marra, product manager, emerging markets and Alex Sourov, engineering manager, emerging markets, wrote in an official blog post.
As part of the update, News Feed can also pull up stories even when there is no connection – such as on a subway – by recalling articles and content that were loaded on a previous Facebook visit but were never clicked on. It’s known as network Connection classification, and the company has open to the many users of the world, so that others can streamline their offerings in a lot the equal way.
The networking platform will also be incorporating a new picture format called Progressive JPEG, which initially shows pictures at lower resolution, until they are fully loaded and can be displayed at their original quality.
As explained by Facebook, this method will allow the users to see more News Feed content instead of struggling with their slow connectivity due to data-heavy videos and images. The system will also work to prioritize content in the News Feed that the person is now looking at over content they aren’t. We made this change for iOS at the beginning of the year and now use the same technology on both iOS and Android. Instead, they will mainly see status updates from their friends and liked pages as well as news stories. With recent updates, we can now start retrieving more stories and photos while you are reading News Feed on slower connections to make sure stories are always available as you keep scrolling.
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Of course, this will come at a cost, in the sense that users with poor internet connectivity will only see the basics. These changes are already supposedly taking place on your Facebook News Feed right now. The app updates those stories with new likes or comments as the user is connected again.
