Facebook’s equivalent of Twitter’s verified users are verified public figures that include actors, musicians, and journalists. The most notable perk of being one is the ability to livestream video to your fans from a special Facebook Mentions app. Available to iOS users since July 2014, the app is now available for Android devices on the Play Store.
Instant Articles are Facebook’s attempts to speed up webpages on mobile in order to keep users reading and sharing within the social network. The serviced fully launched to all iOS users in October and has been in public testing since then on Android. Today, Instant Articles are rolling out to all Android users, as the rest of industry continues work on an open sourced alternative .
Modern ironies: a metro or train journey is one of those occasions when you have some time to catch up on your Facebook feed, but you often have no data connection or a very intermittent one. The company is currently testing a couple of features that should help.
The first is caching posts that have been downloaded but not yet viewed. When you’re offline, the app will display these posts.
We look at all the previously downloaded stories present on your phone that you have not yet viewed, and rank them based on their relevance. We also factor in whether the images for the story are available. This way we can immediately display relevant stories you haven’t seen yet, instead of showing a spinner while you wait for new stories.
Second, it will allow you to comment on posts even when offline, storing your comments in the app and then uploading them once you’re back online.
There’s no indication on when we’ll see the new features, but the fact that Facebook is sharing them suggests that they are likely to be introduced sooner rather than later.
Via Engadget. Photo Dado Ruvic/Reuters.
