If you were still using Facebook to get news from your family and friends, you will have to change your habits. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and owner of Facebook, announced on Thursday July 21that a new tab was going to appear on the social network: it is now on a page called “Thread of publications” that you will have to go to consult “posts from your friends, groups (…)in chronological order “. An update that should be deployed “over the next week”, specifies Meta in a press release.
A way to relegate linear navigation to the background within the content posted by selected contributors – namely your loved ones. Because if it will now be necessary to look for them in a tab placed at the top (on Android) or at the bottom (on iOS) of the screen of your smartphone, it is to better dedicate the main page of the platform, that which welcomes you at each connection, to content “personalized”chosen not by you, but by a “Machine Learning Ranking System”that is to say by an artificial intelligence.
A way for Meta to give a facelift to Facebook: if the social network remains the most used in the world with 2.8 billion users, it struggles to seduce the new generations, more attracted by Instagram, YouTube or, above all, Tik Tok.
This last network has the particularity of offering its users – half of whom are under 25 – a continuous stream of videos selected by an algorithm according to their supposed tastes, rather than inviting them to search for specific content or to s subscribe to a specific creator.
An approach not far from that of Meta which, with the next update of the Facebook home page, therefore intends to offer a “discovery engine”supposed to allow “Find new content and subscribe to new creators through recommendations”.