Facebook knows the social media landscape is very dynamic and it is paramount to keep people locked to your network. That is why they continuously tweak their algorithms and introduce new features to keep the 1.6 billion people more engaged on the platform.
The NewsFeed is one of the core features of Facebook and since it has been blessed with algorithms that track your usage so as to populate your timeline with content you may want to engage in. They made a recent tweak to the system which placed Live Video content above other content on your NewsFeed which was quite major but this next move is even bigger.
One Tom Critchlow noticed the changes Facebook made and posted it on Twitter:
Whoah. Massive change to the Facebook news feed. Anyone else seeing this? pic.twitter.com/EA3dFQRS6y
— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) April 15, 2016
As you can see, his NewsFeed has a tabbed menu bar at the bottom where you can switch between your NewsFeed and News topics like World & US News, Sports, Food and the likes. We have seen this sort of interface being employed by Twitter in their Moments feature which is a collection of tweets in form of text and videos that are arranged in a tabbed interface so that it is easy to consume news. That is not all found by Tom, he noticed something else:
And in a HUGE paradigm shift they're now asking me to add people as "friends" who I don't know… pic.twitter.com/ZW8bTAk93X
— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) April 15, 2016
You can also add complete strangers as friends while scrolling within the topics, which is reminiscent of what we see on Twitter. “There’s a lot more content now with multiple feeds, instead of one,” he told Mashable, “As for the news and sport feeds, they have posts from my friends too and if feels very much more like a news aggregator rather than personal space.”
This shouldn’t be a surprise since Facebook wants to be the only source of news for its 1.6 billion users and that is why they revamped their search to include trending topics, pushed Live Video and their proprietary Instant Articles. Will this move spell doom for Twitter? We will never know until the company decides to release it to the masses and compare with the current Twitter model.
