After seemingly neglecting its outdated notification system for years, Facebook today announced a revamp and new features for the Notifications tab in its mobile application.
Hopefully, this’ll help us cope with a firehouse of alerts from Facebook that we’re being inundated with on any given day.
A more useful, Google Now-like Notifications tab now distinguishes clearly between Facebook’s most important notification types.
Specifically, you’ll see timely alerts for friends’ milestones, birthdays and life events, upcoming events that you’ve joined and sports scores and TV reminders, the latter two based on Pages you’ve liked.
To select which information appears in the revamped Notifications tab, tap the arrow to the right of each card. To add more cards, tap on Add More Cards at the bottom of the tab.
“We’ll continue to listen to feedback about the information people find most useful and may periodically add more cards to choose from,” said the firm.
People who have enabled Location History in the mobile app (and you shouldn’t, really, as doing so kills your iPhone battery) will also see notifications tailored to their location, stuff like severe weather alerts, movies playing in nearby theaters and so forth:
- Things happening around your community, like local events and news that is popular in the city you live in.
- Weather updates, like current conditions and severe weather alerts.
- Movies playing in theaters near you.
- A list of nearby places to eat, with links to the places’ Facebook Pages and reviews.
To see what the expanded, personalized Notifications tab in the mobile app looks like, check out Facebook’s promotional video below.
If you don’t see the embedded clip, watch it on Vimeo.
These changes won’t affect your current notification settings.
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As you might have suspected, the improved Notifications tab is a staggered release so not every single Facebook user will get it at the same time. “These new personalized options will gradually roll out to Facebook for Android and iPhone,” noted the firm.
In addition, the improved Notifications tab is US-only for the time being.
Source: Facebook