Mumbai: People are coming online at a staggering rate in emerging markets and, in most cases, are doing so on mobile via 2G connections. In order to offer a better service and to reach out to more and more people, Facebook is working on improving the newsfeed experience of the social networking site. It is working on designing new features of the website that work seamlessly regardless of mobile network and device, which means that users will be able to load and scroll through the Facebook feed on any connection speed.
Facebook is working on a few updates to improve the experience so it works seamlessly and quickly for people in all parts of the world.
Taking connection speed into account
There are many factors Facebook has to take into account to make sure users are seeing the most relevant stories - even the type of device you're on or the speed of your mobile network or wifi connection. Accounting for these factors helps it to determine what kinds of stories to show on a user’s News Feed. For example, if you are on a slower Internet connection that won't load videos, News Feed will reflect fewer videos and more status updates and links.
Prioritizing which stories to load
If a user is on a poor Internet connection and the News Feed is loading slowly, Facebook will first download the story the user is currently looking at, rather than downloading a series of News Feed stories.
Image formats
Facebook is also investing in the best image formats for photo loading. It recently moved to a Progressive JPEG photo format, which allows a user to show lower-quality versions of photos while they're still downloading, so you can see some of the photo instead of nothing. This lowers the amount of data required to send photos to be loaded, and speeds up the wait time for photos.
Showing stories when on particularly poor connections
Sometimes users are unable to load any new News Feed stories if a connection is particularly congested or poor quality. People have complained that when they visit News Feed they'd rather see stories that may have loaded on a previous visit than not see any stories at all. So now when a user leaves News Feed and then comes back again on a bad connection, Facebook will display previously downloaded stories.
Users can scroll down and see stories from the previous visit to the News Feed until they are able to connect again to a mobile network.
Even though Facebook load stories from previous visits to News Feed, it doesn’t re-retrieve these stories that have already been seen, so no more data is being wasted. However, if something about the story has changed — for example if the number of comments and likes has changed or if the post was deleted — it will make updates when a user looks at the story again.
