Newsletter
Facebook has, so far, been a relatively simple to use app, offering you ways to share what you feel and what you’d like your friends to see, like photos of your last reunion or a short video of you dubsmashing Justin Bieber. However, the social networking app is about to undergo a sea of change soon. Don’t be shocked when you see the front camera opening after you tap on the Facebook app, for it will be in fact the Facebook app which will pull up the front camera first before letting you check on the News Feed. The idea is to enable you to share as many selfies and selfie videos as you want because Facebook thinks you aren’t up to the mark yet.
For those who are conversant with how the Facebook app works, and there are over a billion of them out there, the new feature will surely make capturing selfies and groupies easier than ever. Would you really take a selfie and upload it every time you load the app though? Facebook knows this, so it has devised a simple way to let you get rid of the camera and get back to your profile. Simply swipe down and the camera would go away and if you’d prefer the rear camera to open up instead of the front camera every time you open the Facebook app, simply swipe to the side and the rear camera would get activated and stay that way until you turn it back again. The feature has already rolled out to iOS users in Brazil and Canada as well as Android users in Brazil and if it is successful, it will find its way to your Facebook app after the Olympics Games 2016 are done and dusted. This feature is strongly inspired Snapchat which opens the front camera by default to let you share pictures and videos instantly.
Apart from letting you click selfies and posting frequently, Facebook has also introduced it’s recently-acquired MSQRD’s animated selfie filters which you can use to edit your selfies. These filters are already in use in a number of countries to let users support their favorite teams at the Rio Olympics by adding their national flags and the Olympics logo to their profile pictures. Facebook has been struggling of late with the rise of generic link sharing at the cost of personal posts and has been testing a new way to let users choose articles belonging to a range of categories which they would like to see on their news feed. Such new features along with the latest front-camera-first feature will surely increase the number of personal posts an average user makes over a period of time, but it may also create a number of disgruntled users who will really dislike this feature.