Facebook wants notifications to become much more than a perfunctory list of recent behavior, events and invitations.
Mashable has learned the social network is quietly testing and rolling out a robust new notifications tab that pulls content from across the entire site and serves it up in one central place.
Facebook, which confirmed the development to Mashable, plans to introduce the new tab to mobile users across the U.S. first, then worldwide, although it has yet to pin down exact timing.
“We are testing an updated Notifications tab that adds additional, relevant content about everything that might be helpful to know on a particular day,” a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable.
And then some.
The new Notifications tab will feature eight sections by default:
- Birthdays
- Life Events — a list of events from your friends that were published today, happened today or happened recently.
- Events — shows events you’ve joined
- Nearby Places — shows three nearby places to eat at. Interestingly enough, Nearby Places is time-sensitive and will recommend different venues based on time of day, like a breakfast spot in the morning. It will only show up if the user has Location Services turned on.
- Trending Topics — a list of three topics from the existing Trending Topics area adjacent to your News Feed.
- News Shared Locally — a crop of publicly-shared news that’s popular (read: viral) in your city.
- Today in the Past — displays several posts and photos from some time ago based on whether you liked or commented on them and how popular they were with friends.
- Nearby Friends — shows friends who are well, nearby, but only if the user has opted in to the existing feature on mobile.
Users are currently able to personalize Notifications to show less or more of these sections, although it’s unclear whether this ability to customize will remain once Notifications rolls out worldwide.
Here’s how News Shared Locally and Today in the Past currently appears to some users:
Clicking on “See more…” does just what you would expect: It expands to display several more relevant items, including local news stories in News Shared Locally, for example, or more posts you engaged with a while ago.
This latest rollout is the most ambitious Notifications update for mobile yet, integrating a slew of the social network’s location-based features and giving even news curation a geographic element, in an attempt to make Notifications more useful.
Source: mashable.com