It seems like social media platforms are running out of creativity, because app researcher Jane Manchun Wong — who always reverse-engineers apps to discover new features — just found out that Facebook might transform their News Feed’s browsing method to be similar to Snapchat’s Stories format.
If you’re a Snapchat user, you should know that Snapchat has long changed the way users view Snapchat Stories — they now swipe from right to left to view different individual’s stories. Facebook is about to do the same, removing the current vertical scrolling method.
Facebook is testing to turn News Feed into Story Feed pic.twitter.com/83H7VWcgmD
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) April 15, 2019
Unlike Instagram and Snapchat, Facebook’s Stories is still not as popular, especially when it was just introduced, and with the current Story Feed, we’re not sure how Facebook users will respond to it. Wong also mentioned that the change will mean that both Facebook posts and stories will be using the same UI, so it might be confusing to tell these two apart.
Facebook has admitted that this new feature is still in its early stage as a prototype and is not ready to be publicly experimented. Check out Wong’s Twitter for more information regarding this new carousel UI feature.