The Year in Facebook Changes

The social media giant, Facebook, has been remaking itself over the past year. After declines in active users, particularly its teenage audience, at the start of 2014, many declarations were made (based on one study of Facebook’s user base) that the platform had outlived its time¹. Facebook was just not the cool place to be on the Internet anymore. Even by August, Facebook was losing its college age users to the app Snapchat. A study found that students felt the app gave them more privacy than Facebook, and 70% reported posting to it at least once a day, while only 11% did the same to Facebook².

There were certainly some hiccups with Facebook’s general sense of propriety, as users complained about its experiment dictating what kinds of posts reached people’s news feeds in a short psychological study, as well as forcing the use of the mobile app Messenger onto anyone wanting to use Facebook chat on their phones. However, in spite of all these potential setbacks, the platform kept its head down and has released a dizzying amount of new apps, changes, updates, streamlines, and more in the last six months.
Cue the drumroll.

Apps, apps, and more…Facebook apps

Facebook has become the king of making spin off apps that exist outside of the normal Facebook platform. (We won’t talk about Slingshot, Facebook’s attempt at competition with Snapchat…it was a nice try though). Earlier this year, Messenger was introduced as the mobile version of Facebook Chat, and was quickly made into a required add on. However, the specialized function of Messenger is paying off as the app now has over 500 million users after just a few months, catching up with WhatsApp (which Facebook owns anyway). According to Zuckerberg, “On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think”³.

Continuing the theme, Facebook also responded to backlash over requiring real names to be used as profile names, causing users who wished to share things anonymously or in more privacy to turn to other other apps. Thus, Rooms was launched–pages of any topic that someone can create and post to, completely customizable with settings, privacy, who can be invited to it, and what names participants choose to use. A combination of message boards and private chat rooms, the app doesn’t require you to have a regular Facebook account⁴. And just recently, Facebook Groups have gotten their own app–allowing mobile users to more easily interact with groups they are already in, and use expanded searches to find new ones. For now this app isn’t required, however⁵.

In-house changes

For the Facebook app itself, Facebook made uploading photos easier with a customizable grid layout and bulk uploading options that enable them to be shared more easily “in the moment”⁶. The News Feed now has better menu settings, where instead of completely following or not following someone, even if they remain a friend, you can set how many posts you want to see from a particular person. Posts you’ve liked before can also influence what shows up in your newsfeed. The goal is to continue to customize and optimize the user’s experience on the app⁷. And finally, navigating to the privacy policy has been made simpler, with questions answered in easy to understand sentences, supposedly to give users the feeling of more control over privacy options⁸.

On the horizon

So what’s next, after all of these changes? Facebook isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. They launched Techwire, which along with the Newswire that has already appeared at the right of users home feeds, will be a go to source for tech industry news⁹. And they are working on Facebook at Work, an entirely separate version of the site that would exist for businesses to use as an in-house operating and collaborating tool¹⁰.

They are reporting growth in ad revenue and new active users, and will most likely begin adding payment features inside the platform that allow users to buy items directly…which is the next level of competition for platforms, from Snapchat’s Snapcash option, to Apple Pay. Messenger is already set up to handle future transactions¹¹.

So is Facebook going to go the way of MySpace and fade out of the social media public consciousness that it helped create? Very unlikely.

Apps, apps, and more…Facebook apps

In-house changes

On the horizon

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