Facebook Announces New Features

Today was day one of F8, the Facebook sponsored developer conference. Facebook generally takes some time during the conference to announce new features that will be coming soon to the platform, and this year was no different.

Clear History

The first of the big news is the ability to clear history on your Facebook profile. This feature is definitely in response to the recent privacy issues Facebook has been dealing with lately. While it may be tempting to use the feature frequently, you should know that clearing your history will be similar to clearing the cookies on your web browser. When you clear these files, you may have to re-login frequently and the ads you see on Facebook will likely have nothing to do with your likes and preferences. We all know ads can be annoying, but I do frequently come across an ad on Facebook that is totally relevant and I appreciated seeing.

Improvements to Stories

In an effort to get more people using the Stories feature on Facebook and Instagram, the company has launched an easy way to share other apps to your stories. You will soon be able to share to stories from various apps like Spotify. Just click the share icon and you can send your new favorite song to your story. Also, if you see a feature in someone else’s story, you can click “try it on” to bring the feature to your stories.

Groups

I actually noticed this feature come and go on my Facebook app a few different times. It’s finally a permanent resident and I couldn’t be happier. I love Facebook groups (don’t forget to join ours… Family Tech Talk), and now there is a tab in the Facebook app that will give you quick access to your groups. The feed will consist of posts within your groups, and you will have some quick links to your frequently visited groups. The company also stated that they will add an explore feature to the groups tab that will help you discover groups you might like.

Dating

Watch out Tinder and Match, Facebook has set its sights on your functionality next. The company announced new dating features coming to the app soon. It will take into account the groups and pages you like and interact with and match you with people who have similar interests. The dating portion is opt-in, and operates slightly outside of the Facebook ecosystem so that the things people do within the dating feature will not be shown to their friends. The feature isn’t set to roll out until later this year.

There were definitely more announcements about AR capabilities and VR features, but since those aren’t quite mainstream yet, I won’t get into it. You can read all about those on your own if you are interested.

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