Facebook, a great place to ignore high school reunion invitations and offend every member of your extended family all at once, is now testing some pretty serious timeline changes. Your grandmother's favorite place to share ill-advised political memes is currently testing "customizable, topical feeds" via its mobile apps, Mashable reports. Dubbing the possible new feature "a newspaper made up of all the world's newspapers," Jason Stein shared a glimpse of the feature via Twitter earlier this week:
"People have told us they'd like new options to see and have conversations about more stories on Facebook around specific topics they're interested in," a Facebook spokesperson tells the Verge. "So we are testing feeds for people to view different stories from people and Pages based on topic areas." Though the increasingly old school news feed remains, those in the small test group can now add secondary feeds based on a variety of topics including style, travel, and something called "headlines."
As with all tested Facebook features, this could simply be a brief and fruitless experiment. However, given our aversion to single-option digital experiences, this might very well be a step in a very interesting direction for a company so undeniably influential that even Twitter has continued to emulate both its greatest strengths and most obvious weaknesses.
