Facebook working on Instagram-like ‘Close Friends’ feature called ‘Favourites’

Facebook is building ‘Favourites’, a new feature that it wishes to introduce and encourage users to share more on the platform. It’s similar to Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ feature where users can create a custom list of friends to share stories that they don’t want their entire friends or followers list to view. [caption id=“attachment_4822701” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”]  A Facebook panel is seen at a movie festival in Cannes, France. Image: Reuters[/caption] This feature will appear in Messenger as originally spotted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong. It was later confirmed by Facebook in a TechCrunch report. According to the screenshots posted by Wong, when you’re sharing something using Messenger, you can either share it with ‘Your Story’ or select your ‘Favourites’.

Facebook/Messenger is testing "Favorites" list for Stories

It's like Instagram’s Close Friends pic.twitter.com/dsIinrX1Zd

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 21, 2019

You can select the people you want in your ‘Favourites’ list. Up to 10 people can be manually selected or from the automatically suggested ones. Currently, this feature isn’t exactly the same as Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ but it could become like that in the future. TechCrunch reported that Favourites is currently in the prototyping stage. There’s no internal or public testing of the feature rolled out yet. Hence, when the actual testing begins, the feature could be completely different from how it looks right now.