Traditionally, the Facebook NewsFeed has been a timeline where you see content from Pages that you engage it and posts from your friends. If you wanted to see more content of a certain topic, it usually generates a carousel of articles of a certain topic of which you can choose from.
Two weeks ago, some people spotted a revamped NewsFeed that was similar to what we see on Twitter Moments. It was really cool that Facebook was making this addition since it would make it easy to get more information about a certain topic and finally I got the update.
At the bottom of the page, there is a carousel just like what was observed before with a scrollable list of topics you can view content on. It is one comprehensive list that starts with the News Feed tab then Food, Thoughts, Science & Tech and among others.
As you can see from the above screenshot, the carousel is quite exhaustive and in order to add or remove a topic from the bottom carousel, you only need to toggle the individual switches on the right. To access this menu, you have to swipe the carousel until you find the gear icon which is on the extreme right.
Another interesting observation with the new News Feed is that each post you see on the timeline has been tagged with a topic which is available on the carousel below. Facebook’s algorithms are so good, i’ve not noticed any errors so far with the tagging procedure. If you write a musing, it taggs it as “Thoughts” and when Techweez posts content that is related to music (The first screenshot), it tags it under Music. That is pretty cool and if the algorithm is unable to give a category to the post, it doesn’t tag the post.
In addition, when you pick a specific category, like in this case Science & Tech, it lets you customize the content further where you can explore further subtopics to add. This is important so that you will always be served with content you may likely engage with.
Interestingly enough, I didn’t get the Live Video update on my Facebook Beta app but my colleague Chenze got the Live Video update which is pretty cool.
In his update, there is the dedicated Video button where you can browse the latest Live Video broadcasts on Facebook. You can add topics of your interests or browse the latest Live Video broadcasts.
Both features are not currently available to the regular Facebook app, but since we have received the updates on the Beta update means that they will be rolled out to everyone soon. Better still, you can join the Beta testing program and get these features before anybody else. However, we can’t be all as cool as Zuckerberg since he has another Facebook app that has a yellow icon and we can totally understand that.
