Facebook is redesigning the way its iOS users share content from third-party apps inside of Facebook.
The social network showed off a new share extension for iOS Wednesday that makes it easier for people to control what they are sharing and who they share updates with.
Share extensions are used by third-party apps to allow their users to share content back to Facebook. While this functionality has existed within iOS for some time, the experience up until now hasn’t always been great, Facebook product manager Alyssa Levitz explained.
“We knew we had a lot of room for improvements to make this a better experience for people,” she said, noting that, with the previous version of the extension, tagging friends, seeing previews of posts and filtering who is able to see shared posts wasn’t as intuitive.
The new share extension addresses all of these issues.
The new sharing feature, which is rolling out Wednesday to developers that already use the existing share extension, makes sharing from third-party apps feel much more like sharing on Facebook itself. You can easily tag friends, choose whether you want to share a post publicly, with friends or with a select group of people, and you can see a full preview of the post before you push it out. Additionally, the extension will continue to allow users to share from apps even if they haven’t shared their Facebook credentials with the service.
Though it may seem like a relatively minor change, it represents a huge opportunity for the company. Facebook users shared more than 50 billion pieces of content form third-party apps in the last year, Levitz said, so making the process just a little easier and more engaging stands to have a big impact on how people share to Facebook.
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Source: Mashable