Sometimes the amount of news you get from your friends is simply overwhelming, so Facebook gives you the option of seeing only the most significant events from someone’s life.
After rolling out “A Look Back” and testing Trending Topics (which between you and me, look a lot like Twitter’s), Facebook is looking to introduce Highlights, firstly to mobile platforms and later to desktop. Unfortunately, the new feature is only available on devices running iOS. The latest update for this mobile operating system brought a major change to the table for some lucky iPhone and iPad users: the Requests section went away to make room for People. Within this section, there are 3 tabs, History, Everyone and probably the most important of them all, Highlights.
Facebook Highlights is an experimental feature that points out the event from your friends’ lives that really matter. News of births, weddings and funerals (like it or not, death is still part of our lives, at least until Google finds the answer to eternal life) will most probably appear here, so you no longer have to scroll through endless lists of invitations to Farmville (is that one still around?).
Highlights still shows the new Friend Requests, while hiding the older ones under a See More button. Furthermore, there is the Friends With Birthdays Today panel, in case you’re too lazy to check the Events section of the app. Anyway, this panel gives you no excuse not to call people you’re no longer talking to, but that you haven’t unfriended yet, on their birthdays. After this panel, there’s probably the most interesting part of Facebook Highlights: Life Events. Here’s where you will get to see the things that are truly worth writing home about. More specifically, this panel includes events related to work and education, family and relationships, home and living, health and wellness, travel and experiences – in other words, everything that people submit to the social network through the Life Event feature.
The History tab combines the latest conversations you’ve had with a simplified Activity Log. In other words, Facebook put everything belonging to the past in a single place. The Everyone tab, on the other hand, features all of your connections, listed alphabetically so you can retrieve them easily.
While Facebook Highlights makes things a little easier to browse, I don’t really think that this feature is a major step forward for this social network, let alone something revolutionary. People will tell whether this is interesting or not when and if the features launches on all platforms.
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