Facebook on Thursday rolled out an update to its mobile app that lets you find web links to share without having to switch over to your web browser
Now all you have to do is look for the small link symbol that appears above the phone’s virtual keyboard alongside the “Tag Friends” button. Tapping that brings up a new screen where you can do a keyword search for links.
“We think this feature makes it much simpler to share web links with your friends on mobile, whether it’s an interesting news article, a funny video, or a favorite recipe,” Facebook engineer Tom Whitnah wrote in a company post.
Typing in “LGBT Pride Month,” for example, surfaces a slew of relevant links Facebook thinks you might want to share with friends. Tap on the particular link, and voila, it’s tacked onto the bottom of a status update now for you to share as you please.
A minor update? Absolutely. However, it helps further boost user engagement and builds upon the company’s Graph Search, a feature introduced back in 2013. Graph Search basically takes advantage of all the data Facebook has accumulated over the years and offers users an advanced way to search for people, places and things. Indeed, Whitnah wrote that Facebook’s searchable index now has over 1 trillion posts from users, many of which include shared links.
Graph Search has slowly and steadily become more useful over the last two years, allowing for more and more finely-tuned searches. Now, those finely-tuned searches include links.
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Source: Mashable.com