Facebook to optimise News Feed for slower connections and even go offline

Through the months, Facebook has been making improvements to its mobile app to enhance user experience and now, the company has introduced more updates to  improve the way users work on slower internet connections. In a Facebook blog post, the company stated that “our mission with News Feed is to connect people with the stories that matter most to them, but if people’s News Feeds aren’t loading because of poor internet connections, we can’t show them the most relevant stories.” It added, “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.” The company is currently testing an update in which it looks at all the previously downloaded stories present on a user’s phone that have not yet been viewed, and rank them based on their relevance. It also takes into consideration whether the images for the story are available. This way, Facebook will immediately display relevant stories which haven’t been seen yet, instead of showing a spinner while the user waits for new stories. Also, the Facebook app will rank relevant and downloaded stories upon startup. This will take place while a user navigates to News Feed from the app or pulls down to refresh stories at the top of the feed, or even when one is scrolling through the News Feed. These changes will help anyone who is on a poor internet connection, such as 2G, or even those whose network connectivity is generally good but who have intermittent connections in places like subways and tunnels, or at large events respectively.