Facebook always adds experimental stuff to their mobile apps in a bid to make them more useful to their users. This latest rollout is just as weird.
Today, I woke up to an interesting development on the Facebook app where they have added a rocket tab which looks quite weird.
When you tap on that rocket icon, it brings up an alternate feed from the usual News Feed. From my experience so far, you are fed with content from Pages that you’ve not liked, which is great since you can discover new content being shared on Facebook. Also unlike the News Feed, post from your friends are not featured on the timeline.
On checking out why Facebook did this, Facebook sent out a statement to TechCrunch where they explained this strange addition.
“We are testing a complementary feed of popular articles, videos and photos customized for each person based on content that might be interesting to them. We;ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore new content they havent connected with yet.”
This change may be confusing to a lot of users out there since you have a choice between it and the general News Feed, but it has a purpose. The News Feed is also suited to your needs based on what you like from Pages you’ve liked or posts from your friends, but this complementary feed is for content suited to your interests that you haven’t connected with yet.
This feature succeeds the company’s decision to add Stories to the Facebook app.