Facebook regularly launches new apps and features to see what'll stick, and today it's been discovered that the company is testing a new feature that actually competes with one of its existing products.
A feature called Popular Photos has been tested inside the Facebook app. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the feature was in testing in October and that the test has since been concluded. However, Facebook says it's working on improving the Popular Photos feature and will do more testing in the future.
With Popular Photos, you can tap on a photo in your News Feed to view it full screen and then get an endless scroll of photos from your Facebook friends, similar to an Instagram feed. These photos are full screen with a black background, just like you'd see when viewing them normally, but Popular Photos lets you scroll through the full screen photos rather than jumping from one image to the next in your news feed.
The goal here is to give you an easy way to see all of the popular photos in your feed without having to scroll past links and status updates. With Popular Photos, the experience of using Facebook is much more like Instagram than the typical Facebook experience.
It's kind of strange to see Facebook testing out a feature that's so similar to Instagram, an app that's owned by Facebook. It seems like the company wants to offer users a more relaxed, easy-to-use photo experience in Facebook, where there may be people posting photos that don't use Instagram. It's unclear if Popular Photos will end up being rolled out to every Facebook user, but with more testing to come, it's possible that at least some of us will see it in the Facebook app soon.
