Today Facebook announced a rather substantial change to its app. First of all, the main feed you see when you open the app is now called Home, which makes sense and is very overdue. But this is not the big news.
The big news is that there is now an additional tab in the app called Feed. And this tab is sorted in reverse chronological order – you know, how what is now called Home was used before the algorithm took over.
The Feed tab has some filters of its own – you can have it show you everything or just stuff from your friends, groups, pages or favorites – this is a curated list of your friends and pages you care about most.
As for the Home feed, Facebook is now positioning it as “more of a discovery engine to find and follow new content and creators through recommendations.” The counterweight is Feeds, where you go “to access the content of the people and communities you are already connected with”. There are no “Recommended for You” posts in the feeds.
The new Home and Feed tabs are starting to roll out today for a small subset of Facebook users on both iOS and Android. Everyone on Facebook should get them next week.
Note that the shortcut bar that houses these tabs is at the bottom of the Facebook app on iOS and at the top on Android. The tabs in the shortcut bar will change based on the parts of the app you use the most, but you can customize and lock the tabs in the shortcut bar, thus making their placement permanent if you wish.
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