Facebook Inc. is one of the largest online social media and networking platforms, and it’s going through a phase wherein it stays in the news for both good and bad news. Whether it was Cambridge Analytica data scandal or the incident when two third-party employees posted users data online in plain sight, it has always been indicted of data violation. Now, it’s been accused of using the same feature as Instagram.
Facebook has named it as Popular Photos. In this post, we will let you know all about Popular Photos.
Popular Photos
The new feature from Facebook works the same as Instagram’s more posts feature. We can explore N number of related photos by scrolling down. The company had quietly been working on the product for a while, and they did run a small test in October’19 as well. The motive behind the product and the universal update launch date hasn’t been confirmed by Facebook, however, they are planning to release more features in the near future.
How Does It Work?
Whenever users discover a photo in the profile or news feed, they can tap and see it full-screen on a black theatre-view background. Normally, if users swipe or scroll on the photo, the application will bring them back from where they started. However, with this new feature, users will be able to check out more images once they scroll through the original one.
Once they scroll down past the Popular Photos title, they’ll be able to view additional pics and a “See More Photos” label. This will give them access to explore more public and friends-only images shared by the people they are connected with. The difference here is, Popular photo will shorten out the captions to 65 characters unlike Instagram’s 165 characters so that the stream won’t look massively wordy.
Being a heavy-link feed, Facebook becomes exhausting at times, compared to the other visual-based social media applications i.e. Tik Tok, Instagram, and Snapchat. The user has to dig in to get to the meaning of the media, and then access it instead of getting continuous and instantly entertained. It’s not that people don’t like Facebook but, since now we have other options, (as mentioned above) which to be true, are easier to use and keeps us more engaged. Facebook had a dedicated photos bookmark in the past (on Desktop version) where you could browse the content, but with time, the bookmark disappeared.
What Do We Think?
Facebook has been in the market for over 14 years and has continuously been a hot topic, no matter what the reason is. However, despite being the one of the largest social media platforms, Facebook has been facing a downfall in the number of users. Well, I can think of two reasons, out of those, first and foremost is “security”. Big time concern can’t and won’t compromise. Period! The second one could be the increased competition, as apps like Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., are easier to use, and more entertaining than Facebook.
As per the stats from eMarketer, the average time spent by users on Facebook in the United States of America have degenerated over time. Now since the new “Popular Photo” feature resembles Instagram Feed (which people are using already), Facebook may have a chance to get more users along with current ones and engage them to spend more time on the same.
We Are Listening
What do you think about this new Facebook feature? Do you think it will increase the number of users for Facebook? Will Popular Photos be able to engage users to stream on Facebook enough? Will users forget about the scandals and incidents they had to face while using Facebook? Or Facebook has reached the point where it can only go downwards (given the recent years continuous unfortunate events)? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.