Facebook testing feature to separate posts from friends and publishers

Facebook has started testing a new feature that will ensure posts from friends and family are given priority over others.
You may soon have two feed setup, which means one for post from dear ones and another from the pages you have liked.

Facebook testing this change publishers may have to pay soon

Facebook is used to stay connected with friends, family, keep a track of their happening lives, consume news and other interesting stories. All of this appears under news feed. Now, what if you have two such feeds - one to view what your friends and family has shared and the other to access content from publishers or rather all the other content from the pages you have liked. This is exactly what the company possibly plans for the future.

Facebook has started testing a new feature that will ensure posts from friends and family are given priority over others. You may soon have two feed setup, which means one for post from dear ones and another from the pages you have liked.

The Guardian reports that the testing has already started in six countries including Sri Lanka. So, you will have a primary or main feed for all the stories that are posted by your dear ones, and then there will be a secondary feed for the Pages.

This could be a setback for publishers who mostly rely on the social network for traffic. Now, it has further sparked speculation that publishers may have to start paying Facebook if they want to see their stories.

However, in a blogpost, Facebook has explained, "The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further. There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore. Unfortunately, some have mistakenly made that interpretation — but that was not our intention."

For more reliable and latest news