Facebook's news feed can be called a hive of random content your friends post, and whether you like it or not, there's no easy way to customise it. But if the social networking giant has its way, users of the Facebook mobile app will have have a news feed brimming with content of their choice, according to a report by Tech Hive. Facebook is reportedly testing a new option for the news feed, which will enable subjects of the pages users may have "liked" previously to appear under a new section: "Recent Articles about". So based on the pages that users may have "liked" in the past, the news feed will vary with content that is useful, or be clogged with even more random data.
However, the task may be easier said than done. Tech Hive reports, “To buy into articles-related-to, you have to trust Facebook to serve up links to content that you really want to read. That's not an easy task and not one likely to be accomplished by calling your attention to a piece just because you "like" a particular Facebook page and an article related to the subject of that page is getting a lot of attention from Facebook's minions.”
For those who haven't noticed yet, the news feed already has a Trending Articles option. However, there is quite some difference between Articles Related to and Trending Articles. The latter comprises of articles that have been gaining interest and can be about anything. Articles Related to, on the other hand, are topics that a user has already expressed an interest in.
Facebook is increasingly concentrating on mobile to expand its business and reach more audiences. Late in January this year, the company announced in its Q4 earnings call that Facebook Mobile’s Daily Active Users exceeded those on the desktop version of the website for the first time ever. CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the surge in mobile users, saying, “There’s no argument, Facebook is a mobile company.” He also referenced a comScore report to prove that Facebook is the top app in the US, beating Google Maps, and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent on mobile apps in the country.
In line with its focus on mobile, Facebook is building its own mobile location tracker. Trying to benefit from the growing number of smartphone users, Facebook is developing a whole new app for tracking purposes. Currently, Facebook does work with locations, but only through check-ins and geo-tagged posts. With this new app Facebook will try to help users locate friends nearby while their location is tracked in the background.
According to sources working closely with its development, the new app is slated to be released sometime in mid-March and is designed to run in the background. Reports suggest that the app in essence will be quite similar to Google Latitude, Apple Find My Friends and similar services.
There is no doubt about the fact that Facebook and smartphones are two things that most of the modern world feels incomplete without, and it only makes sense for Facebook to take mobile development ahead at great speed.
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