It’s in with the old at Meta.
The company is introducing a new feature that’s all about capturing the essence of the early experience of using Facebook.
Meta is launching a friends tab that shows your friends’ stories, reels, posts, birthdays, and friend requests without any recommended content, the company announced on Thursday. The tab formerly showed friend requests and people you may know.
It’s available starting Thursday in the US and Canada.
“Connecting with friends has been a part of Facebook since it launched,” Meta said in its announcement. “Over the years, Facebook evolved to meet changing needs and created best-in-class experiences across Groups, Video, Marketplace and more, but the magic of friends has fallen away.”
The company added that it’d introduce more “OG” Facebook experiences later this year.
Zuckerberg had hinted before at wanting to get back to Facebook’s roots.
“I’m excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook,” he’d said in Meta’s Q4 earnings call in January. “I think we’re going to build some awesome things that shape the future of human connection.”
On an episode of “The Colin and Samir Show” podcast released Thursday, Zuckerberg said that rolling out the new tab represents “phase one of bringing back OG Facebook.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be as used as like the main news feed, but I think people are going to like it, and I think when you add in a handful of other things like this it will change the way that people feel about and use Facebook,” he said.
Zuckerberg said over time, sharing and newsfeed “outscaled and ended up being by far the most important part of the product,” so Facebook focused on that, to the detriment of the other “fun and useful parts of the original experience” of using the social media platform.
“There’s this whole opportunity that I think is going to be pretty fun, which is just to kind of go one by one and build up a bunch of these things that used to be these joyful experiences that people had as part of Facebook that just kind of don’t exist on the internet today,” he said.
