Hold the press, or don’t. Meta has decided to change Facebook’s Newsfeed name to Feed…
To make its branding more straightforward, Facebook has announced that it would be changing the “News Feed,” the app’s central feature, to just “Feed” in order to streamline the user experience.
In part, Facebook is making the move because the inclusion of “news” in “News Feed” was causing confusion for certain users, according to the social media giant.
According to Alex Heath of The Verge, the “news” designation has caused people to assume that there are just news pieces in the main stream and that there are no postings from friends, as has been reported by others.
Misunderstanding?
This does not appear to be a very plausible scenario. For starters, Facebook has more than 2.9 billion users, which means that the vast majority of people are familiar with how the program works and what is presented in the main feed by this point, so the notion that there is some misunderstanding based on language appears to be a bit absurd.
While the majority of the western world is familiar with Facebook, many other parts of the world are still in the early stages of the adoption process, and for these newcomers, there may be some ambiguity about what the term “News Feed” refers to in terms of the content that they see on the social networking site. While at the same time, there isn’t a prominent ‘News Feed’ headline at the top of the app, so I’m not entirely sure how such an association would truly, realistically arise.
In any case, it’s possible that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is looking at this as an opportunity to re-ignite use — because maybe, just maybe, it feels that people are becoming confused by the “News Feed” label, and as a result are just not using Facebook at all.
Facebook decrease in daily use
Facebook’s daily active usage did decrease in the most recent quarter, marking the first time the social media platform has experienced a decrease in daily usage. That alone may have been sufficient to bring about a shift in attitude.
However, in terms of technical and practical implications, the update is meaningless.
Facebook reaffirmed the following in a press release:
In order to properly represent the different information that users view on their Feeds, we have changed the name. “This is only a name change, and it has no affect on the overall app experience.”
As a result, it has no effect on what the News Feed is or does, and it will have no effect on the News Feed (now referred to as ‘Feed’) algorithm or your in-app experience.
Steve Brown
Resource Group Media
