After the strongly change of the news feed, that obtained many bad reviews by the penalised advertising pages and not only, Mark Zuckerberg decided to try a new feature called Watch Party. According to what the Facebook‘s creator said, it should be an incentive to guarantee a sharing and active participation during the videos’ enjoyment, instead of a passive viewing of them.
Watch Party: watch videos in company thanks to Facebook
Watch Party is active and it is a function thought for FB’s groups, which allows to their members to see simultaneously videos and carry on with comments and so on. Every public video on Facebook can be included in a Watch Party’s session, both if it is live and if the video is registered. The purpose is to make the video’s viewing a social and interactive experience. Fidji Simo, vice president of the Facebook’s product division, said: “Facebook Live totally changed the way how the users can engage social relationships. The statistics say that, nowadays, the live videos make relationships six times more that the normal video posted on Facebook. Thinking about them, we would like to focus on the experience’s creation that let the people getting closer and that inspire the connection between the people instead of the passive consumption”. To start a Watch Party’s session, the group’s moderators select one o more video and post them inside the group. Currently, it isn’t possible to program it in advance. When a Party is ongoing, the members will see a widget Watch Party on the group’s page. Who will enter after, will see the same video that everyone is watching. The members can watch the video in line, to see what will happen next. Watching a video on a mobile device, the comments of the group’s members appear overlapping on the video. On the desktop, instead, they appear in a toolbar on the right side of the video.
Facebook claims that they created Watch Party because they found out that live videos encourage more social interaction then the pre-registered ones. Transform pre-registered videos into live events could help the people to better enjoy them. The news arrives a week after that Facebook said that they were going to make substantial changes to the news’ feed, in part to reduce the low quality videos’ quantity offered to their own users. Watch Party, thoug, isn’t a completly new idea because Microsoft already tested in the past with the Xbox 360 a “party mode” that allowed the users to speak with their friends XBOX while they were watching together Netflix. The mode is been deleted with an upgrade of the firmware in the 2011, drawing the complaints of the fans.
Facebook and the figthing against the “Fake News”
The Facebook’s revolution ongoing isn’t stopping here, because the company’s CEO decided to hardly fighting the fake news, by launching a survey about the reliability of the informations’ source, to which the users will be invited to answer. Currently the questions are limited to the american users and they are the following, without any kind of shadow: “Do you recognize the following web sites?” and “How much do you trust the following web sites?“. The results will need to the Facebook’s team to indentify the online journals more reliable and encourage them. A facebook’s spokesman confirmed to BuzzFeed that will be that ones the survey’s questions that will be used, without any kind of variation, at least in the first phase. The source added even that Facebook prepared the survey, without ask anything to third parts. To speak was Zuckerberg, that said in a public post: “We will ask to the people how much they know a determined source and how much they trust on it. The idea is that same newspapers are really read by reader, others that have behind their success a company. This upgrade won’t change the amount of news that we see on Facebook. It will just change the balance, bringing us to that kind of news considered more reliable by the community”.
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