Facebook Working on Improving News Feeds For Slower Connections

Facebook on Thursday announced that it is testing changes to News Feed to improve user experience regardless of the device or internet connection being used.

The social networking giant said in a blog post that people are accessing Facebook at an astounding rate in emerging markets and in most cases they come online on their mobile handset via 2G connections. Poor internet connection disrupts smooth loading of News Feeds.

“As a next step in improving people's experiences on slower internet connections, we are shipping several changes that will more efficiently show you relevant stories in your News Feed when you're on a slow connection and will let you compose comments on posts when you're offline”, Facebook said in a blog post.

Facebook said that it is testing an update in which it will look at all the previously downloaded stories present on a phone that have not been viewed, and rank them based on their relevance. By this it hopes to immediately display relevant stories that a user hasn’t seen, instead of showing a spinner while the user waits for new stories.

The company also announced another update which will enable users to comment on stories they see when they don't have an internet connection.

“While the ability to like and share posts when you're offline has been available for some time, now you can comment on posts and the comment will be posted whenever you next have a connection”, the blog post added.

These changes will not only help users with a poor internet connection, but also people who have intermittent connections in places like subways and tunnels, or at large events.