You may think Facebook has hit peak popularity, but the social network is still looking to expand in areas where the internet is hard to find. And the tech it develops for those developing countries might benefit you on your commute to work.
Facebook announced last night that it will start caching posts on its mobile app to make them available for viewing offline or on slow connections. Not only that, but it will also look at posts that were already loaded, but not scrolled to, the last time you looked at your News Feed. On slower or non-existent connections, it will put those posts at the top of the News Feed so you have something new to look at.
The algorithm also chooses posts that don’t need a further network connection to get the full content of the post. So you’ll see less links to content outside of Facebook when you’re on a slow connection, but more photos and text posts instead.
And if you want to like or comment on them, it’ll even cache those actions, sending them out again when you reconnect to the network. That means you don’t have to wait to post that witty comment on your friend’s group shot from last night.
The slow- and no-connection features are in testing right now, but should be rolling out to more users soon.
