It’s Facebook’s F8 conference this week, a chance for the social networking platform to give their users and developers a heads-up about new features in the works, as well as a timely chance to reassure members about the various privacy and security worries that have been plaguing the company for the past handful of years.
We outline some of the changes and announcements made by Facebook.
Perhaps the most noticeable change to Facebook for more users will be a total design overhaul for both the Facebook app and the desktop browser version of Facebook. In fact it may very well be the most significant design overhaul to Facebook since the social networking platform launched. You may very well associate Facebook with the color blue, but that is going to be a thing of the past as Facebook takes on more neutral colors to appear more “modern and fresh”.
The redesign has already launched for some users on the mobile app, and will be rolling out for desktop users in around a month.
But of course, Facebook’s woes are far deeper than the aesthetics of their interface. Core issues at the heart of how the company approaches privacy and security is what really concerns its users and industry experts, and Facebook has addressed that too, claiming Facebook will be a more privacy focused platform going forward.
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Facebook’s Messenger app is to be given end-to-end encryption, bringing it up to speed (on a privacy level) to Facebook-owned WhatsApp. End-to-end encryption means that all messages sent between sender and recipient are encrypted, meaning no one – not even Facebook – can read them. Only the recipient has the decryption key that is needed to read the message, which all happens automatically by the app itself.
That may ease some theories that Facebook is reading your messages in order to target you with adverts.
Speaking of Messenger, there will also be two new apps. A new fully functional mobile app that is significantly lightweight when compared to the full Messenger app yet still contains high-end capabilities, unlike the existing Messenger Lite version which is designed to operate on low-end hardware.
And there will be a new desktop app that has video capabilities and other features that Messenger.com or the Facebook.com chat features don’t have.
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Facebook wants to promote Facebook groups, claiming they will play a significant part in the future of Facebook. Facebook claim that people using groups has risen significantly over the last year as people opt to interact with smaller, interest-based communities. This means groups will feature more heavily on newsfeeds, and will have many more features for both members and admins, including the ability to post to groups anonymously.
A new feature will allow friends to watch videos in real time using video chat features on Messenger, which Facebook calls a “virtual living room”.
Facebook has also announced changes for the Instagram app, one being that content such as photos and videos will no longer have the number of likes visible to the public in a bid to emphasise focus on the content itself as opposed to its corresponding engagement metrics. However the number of likes content receives is still going to be visible to the user who posted the content.
Currently, to create a post on Instagram, a user has to post either a photo or a video. That’s going to change as users will now be able to create their own text based posts using the Instagram camera feature that will allow users to create coloured backgrounds with text overlaid on top. (Currently a popular “hack” is to take a darkened photo as to appear entirely black and then overlay text over the top.)
One of Facebook’s more curious new features in the works is a feature that will allow you to find your “secret crush” from your pool of Facebook friends. The feature will work by allowing you to tell Facebook that you’re romantically interested in a particular friend. If that friend also tells Facebook the same thing about you, then you’re both notified about the match, and from there it’s presumably up to you to do the rest.
But don’t worry, if your love is unrequited and the friend doesn’t given Facebook the corresponding heads up, they’ll never know a thing.