Facebook is trying to really hard to tell people it owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Earlier this month, the company introduced new branding for all of its apps. On Wednesday, it introduced Facebook Pay, a service that’ll work across all apps. Now, it’s testing an Instagram feed-like feature in its main app.
A report by TechCrunch suggests the social network tested a feature called ‘Popular Photos’ in its app last month. Currently, if you tap on a photo from the news feed, and swipe down you’re redirected back to your feed. However, with this new feature, you can tap on “See more photos” and keep scrolling down.
Popular Photos also truncates the caption after 65 characters – as compared to 125 characters in the Instagram feed.
Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch it was running a small test and it has now concluded. The company will make changes to the feature and run updated tests in the future.
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At the moment it’s not clear what features it’ll include in future versions or when it’ll roll out. We’ve asked Facebook for more details, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.
The social network already offers endless scrolling of related videos through the news feed. For instance, if you tap on a sports-related video, Facebook will show you more sports-related videos as you scroll down.
A report by eMarketer published in May suggests time spent on the Facebook app by the US-based users has declined over time. So while the Popular Photo feature resembles Instagram’s feed, Facebook might be just trying to increase visual elements on its app in order to lure people to spend more time on it.
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