Facebook Returns to Its Roots: Showing Posts From Friends and Family

Technology|Facebook Returns to Its Roots: Showing Posts From Friends and Family

Last year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, and Tom Alison, one of his top lieutenants, were discussing how they wanted to reshape Facebook for the future of social networking.

Mr. Zuckerberg, who had grown Facebook from a dorm room project to a $1.5 trillion company that he renamed Meta, wanted to bring back some of the original rationale for the social network, or what he called “OG Facebook” vibes, Mr. Alison said in an interview. After years of adding features, the executives felt that some of Facebook’s key functions were being drowned out.

So they asked themselves: Why not try building some features that resembled the Facebook of yore a bit more?

On Thursday, Meta did just that with a simple tweak. The company said the Facebook app would now include a separate news feed for users that featured posts shared exclusively by people’s friends and family.

The feature, called the Friends Tab, will replace a tab in the app that showed new friend requests or suggested friends. Friends Tab will instead show a scrolling feed of posts, such as photos, video stories, text, birthday notifications and friend requests. For now, it will be available to Facebook users only in the United States and Canada.

“This idea of having a central place of what’s going on with your friends, that was like the magic of the early days of social media,” said Mr. Alison, who is head of the Facebook app. “We’re making sure that there’s still a place for this stuff on Facebook. It is something that shouldn’t get lost in the modern social media mix.”