Could Facebook be a one-stop shop for every aspect of your personal life? The social media company sure hopes so.
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By also letting you fine tune the kinds of notifications you see, Facebook is making the notifications tab more of a destination in its app for all kinds of information. But most people will stick with the defaults, and the result is a kind of secondary News Feed that (at least in the case of news and sports scores) carries much of the same information as the original. Notifications have traditionally been the place in a social app where you see the absolute most personally relevant information; by expanding what it sees as notification-worthy, Facebook may be diluting that.
“We’ve heard feedback that people wanted to add important information that they can easily see, all in one place”, said Facebook product manager Keith Peiris.
Enabling your Location History will mean things like local events and weather will pop up in your panel. With the new version, you’ll find the 5 or so most recent activity notifications at the top, with handfuls of additional – and hopefully useful – information below. The idea is essentially for your services to get better at anticipating what you want to see at any given moment.
Facebook now wants to tell you about new things it thinks you’ll be interested in, not necessarily things you already know about or have liked in the past.
Notifications in the Facebook app has always been a simple, linear list of activity you’re involved in.
Users’ notification settings will not change and can still be adjusted manually.
Or maybe you’ll just spend a lot of time obsessively scrolling through both.
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But British Facebook users will have to wait a bit longer for the new features – the personalised notifications tab is only being rolled out in the USA for the time being.
