Dive Brief:
- Several new Facebook features created during the tech giant’s latest Hackathon might be debuting on the platform soon, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as reported by Computer World.
- Zuckerberg said adding GIFs to comments would work by allowing users to tap a button that leads to a pop-up menu. It is expected to be “ready to ship sometime soon."
- Other new features include allowing Messenger users to request a friend’s location, offline messaging so users communicate peer-to-peer with nearby friends and AI-enabled shareable photo albums.
Dive Insight:
Facebook, while the largest social media platform, is under growing pressure to innovate as younger consumers migrate to newer offerings like Snapchat. The photo-messaging app, in particular, is also attracting a growing portion of advertising, which is sure to have caught Facebook's attention.
Giving a bigger role to GIFs on Facebook makes sense as the short animations are very popular with users. Marketers have also embraced GIFs.
The offline communications feature would use Messenger Lite and Wi-Fi Direct to allow users to communicate directly without requiring internet access or going through the Facebook platform and could be available to users within a few months. This might also enable users to communicate with nearby businesses.
Another new feature will take advantage of artificial intelligence to help users create photo albums and video streams compiled from friends around specific events like weddings or birthday celebrations where the technology would create media collections from multiple users who attended an event. Facebook is one of many tech companies actively applying AI solutions and the new feature fits into Facebook’s strongest AI area in facial recognition tech. Its engineers are actively using machine learning to determine which users might want to create a photo album or video stream.