News feeds on Facebook can be filled with media-heavy content such as auto-playing videos and high-quality pictures, but users with speedy Internet connections are the only ones that can fully enjoy the experience.
While 4G LTE connections are now available, a huge chunk of users on Facebook are located in emerging markets where weak 2G connections are the norm. These users find it hard to load videos and images on the social network due to their slower Internet connections.
A new update on Facebook will now have the social network's News Feed display content depending on the connection of the user.
"What this means for us on the News Feed team is making sure people can load and scroll through News Feed on any connection speed," said Facebook in a blog post, written by Chris Marra, Facebook emerging markets product manager, and Alex Sourov, Facebook engineering manager.
For users that have a weak Internet connection, Facebook will be prioritizing the loading of content that the user is looking at, and will then be attempting to load the content that will be scrolled to next. Previously, Facebook attempts to load several items on the News Feed at the same time, which splits the bandwidth among the items.
For users that have their Internet connection broken off, Facebook will show stories that have been cached or previously loaded on the News Feed, compared to before when such a situation will only show a blank page.
The News Feed will also avoid showing content to users with slower connections. For example, instead of streaming videos that Facebook knows the user's connection would not be able to handle, the News Feed will instead focus on displaying test-based content such as links and status updates.
At the same time, Facebook "can now start retrieving more stories and photos while you are reading News Feed on slower connections." So if you're reading one post while on a bad connection, Facebook will start loading other stories so they're ready when you continue scrolling.
Facebook also said that it is investing into the best formats of pictures for loading the content on the social network by adopting Progressive JPEG. This would allow Facebook to show images at a lower quality until the download is competed, so that users would be able to see some of the picture instead of just a blank space.
The update of Facebook to have the News Feed depend on the user's connection is important to the company's mission to have its next billion users sign up to the service, as a huge part of this next billion users will come from countries where 4G LTE connectivity is not widely available, if at all.
This mission is also why the company recently signed a partnership with Eutelsat to be able to bring Internet connectivity to the most remote parts of Africa by next year.
Photo: Mixy Lorenzo | Flickr
