Some Facebook users have been surprised by the addition of an alternate News Feed within the social network’s iOS app.
Those who see the rocket ship icon along the bottom of the screen get access to a second feed of photos, articles, and videos that Facebook believes you might be interested in.
Facebook has been making some significant changes and improvements recently to make the News Feed a more enjoyable experience, and to keep up with rival networks like Snapchat. Just last week, it introduced its very own Stories feature.
Now the company, which boasts more than 1.86 billion users, is developing a second News Feed. TechCrunch reports that it “consists of posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed, like Facebook Pages or posts news media organizations, for example.”
Even though you might not be following the sources that appear in this feed, Facebook believes you will be interested in the content it presents you. It chooses this content based on other pages you have liked, as well as those that are popular among your friends.
What has Facebook done now? I already really dislike that marketplace crap. Now what's this rocket icon thing??? pic.twitter.com/l0obKojCJH
— Oklahoma violated tribal jurisdiction for 113 yrs (@AC_NoChill) March 4, 2017
This alternate news feed isn’t available to everyone yet, but some can already gain access to it while it’s in testing. To find out if you’re one of them, open the Facebook app on your iPhone and look for the rocket ship icon pictured in the tweet above.
Facebook has previously tested this feed on Android among beta users, while an earlier test on iOS labeled the feed “Explore.” Now that the feature is being made available to regular users, it shouldn’t be too long before we all see it.
