Leaked Memo Details Facebook's Plan for a Major Redesign
Facebook is planning a major redesign, heavily focused on recommendations from Pages, creators, and people you don't follow.
An internal Facebook memo was leaked to and published by The Verge(Opens in a new window). It was written by Tom Alison, head of the Facebook app, and details how the social network will make TikTok-esque changes that rely heavily on recommended posts, "regardless of where they come from."
The company hopes an increased emphasis on short-form Reels videos and the second marriage of Messenger and Facebook (mimicking TikTok's messaging function) will be enough to lure young people back to the 18-year-old platform.
"The risk for us is that we dismiss this as being not valuable to people as a form of social communication and connection and we fail to evolve," Alison wrote in a comment to employees underneath the memo text.
Though slow to acknowledge TikTok as a real threat, Facebook now believes the popular video hosting platform is encroaching on its turf. "I think the thing we probably didn't fully embrace or see is how social this format could be," Alison told The Verge in an interview following the memo leak.
Moving forward, Facebook's main tab will feature a mix of Stories and Reels above recommended posts culled from Facebook and Instagram. The whole site is expected to be more visual, with clearer prompts for sending friends a post via direct message, as well as the return of the Messenger inbox eight years after it split from the Facebook app.
Instagram, meanwhile, has already begun its push for more videos. Recently it extending Reels to 90 seconds and invited users to pin three posts to the top of their grid. In April, head Adam Mosseri asked users to stop reposting TikToks to the
Read more on pcmag.com
