Besides the obvious, this update does not impact anything else other than the actual name. Unlike the change from ‘Facebook’ to ‘Meta’, today’s announcement renames Facebook’s time-old ‘News Feed’ into simply ‘Feed’. The decision to change the name of the app’s main element was mostly reasoning that had to do with brand simplification and nothing more.

Just Feed

Facebook’s primary reason for insisting on this rename was because the mention of ‘News Feed’ was apparently confusing for some. Alex Heath from The Verge reported that the “News” labeled to some believing that the mainstream was made up of nothing but news stories and not necessarily posts by friends.

However, that story doesn’t quite check out, at least not totally. Facebook has more than 2.9 billion users, which makes it safe to assume that most people are fairly familiar with how the app and its features work, including what gets displayed on the main Feed. We’re not saying that the reason behind the decision is impossible, just that it sounds a little strange.

Then again, there could be some logic behind this. At least in the majority of the Western world, people are pretty familiar with Facebook. However, many other regions are still within the initial adoption process. For newcomers, the term ‘News Feed’, at least in regards to what they’d expect to see, does sound a bit confusing. Likewise, it’s not like there’s a big header that says ‘News Feed’ at the top of the display, so how such association occurs isn’t too clear either.

Perhaps this is one way that parent company Meta sees how it can re-ignite Facebook usage – in believing that some people get confused by the ‘News Feed’ descriptor, choosing to avoid using Facebook entirely, a change to a less ambiguous name might be more appealing. Furthermore, Facebook’s latest quarterly performance report did indicate a decline in daily active users, the first time Facebook had ever registered a loss in daily usage. This could have been enough to also spark the change.

Again, we reinstate that the update virtually means nothing. Facebook released in a press statement that:

“This is just a name change to better reflect the diverse content people see on their Feeds. This is just a name change and does not impact the app experience more broadly.”

The Wrap

For the most part, it’s really just taking the word ‘News’ out of the name, that’s it. There’s no practical change or tweak to the stream’s function, as well as how it interacts with Facebook’s algorithm. Perhaps these changes will happen sometime in the future, but for now, the most we can do is view this as a fairly minor update. It’s not irrelevant, just very very basic; in every sense of the word.

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Sources 

https://bit.ly/3JrX9da