Facebook now has an offline News Feed

Image credit: Facebook

Facebook’s quest to be accessible to as many people as possible around the world continues. Some of the major foes to be vanquished when it comes to a lot of emerging territories (which Facebook is quite keen on) are spotty connectivity and shoddy mobile infrastructure.

The house that Mark built is leaning into that problem so hard it introduced internal initiatives like 2G Tuesdays, when internet speeds within the company slow down to emulate 2G connections. The company also got many employees to buy less-than-top-of-the-line Android phones so they’ll get a feel for how people in markets like India and Southeast Asia interact with the service. Not only are phones like these easier to get in those markets, but for many people there, they’re the only means of getting online.

See: 5 ways Facebook is going all-out to win over IndiaYesterday, the company announced some additional functionality to the News Feed, arguably Facebook’s most used feature, to enable people to keep reading and interacting with their timeline even on a 2G connection or a patchy spot like an underground tunnel.

The new feature takes news stories that have already been downloaded to your phone but you have not viewed yet, and presents them to you arranged according to relevance. For ranking them, the system takes into account factors that the “normal” timeline does, as well as things like whether images for a story have already been downloaded or not.

The goal is for you to be able to keep scrolling your newsfeed even offline, without having to see the dreaded spinning circle that indicates the app is looking for more content to load.

The app already allows liking and sharing posts offline, but that functionality now extends to commenting, with your comments appearing for other users when you’re back online. Obviously the functionality doesn’t seem to extend beyond Facebook itself – you won’t be able to click on a news story offline and have it appear on your browser, for example. It’s unclear whether things like Instant Articles will be able to load.