Facebook is announcing a series of updates to its platform today, many of which focus on pushing users out of their social bubble of friends and family.
Updates include adding new tabs to Facebook that are designed to show users more content, including recommendations based on a person's location. A new “Local” tab collects content from other Facebook interfaces like the resale platform Marketplace, local groups and events – essentially what sounds like Facebook's version of Nextdoor. The Local tab is being tested in ten US cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Austin, Texas.
Facebook will also begin testing an “Explore” tab similar to Instagram’s feature of the same name: a personalized page of recommended photos, videos and other content that is unique to each person. The company says the Explore tab will be based on a user's interests and display content from “real people and expert communities” such as travel tips and DIY tutorials.
Another new tab is targeting TikTok. Facebook is adding a full-screen video feed similar to TikTok's For You page that aggregates short, long-form and live videos in one place. In recent years, tech companies have followed TikTok, introducing more short-form video content and recommendation-based feeds. Facebook says young adults on the platform now spend 60 percent of their time watching videos, and it promises a “turbo-charged” recommendation algorithm in this new feed. In other words, this is Facebook's attempt at a hyper-personalized “For You” page.
Messenger is also getting a big update in the form of Messenger Communities, a feature similar to Slack or Discord. Communities allow users to create multiple chat rooms on different topics, grouped under a larger umbrella: for example, an incoming college class group with different chats for announcements, campus news, or student clubs. These chats can be created without members belonging to a Facebook group.
The rise of TikTok has resulted in many social media platforms no longer showing users content posted by friends, family and existing networks, but rather content shared by accounts they don't follow – which is an algorithm predicts what they might like. Meta has also been signaling that it is moving in this direction for several years, both on Facebook and Instagram, where the amount of recommended content is constantly increasing.