Facebook is currently rolling out a new colored backgrounds feature for status updates.
Although Facebook believes that the future communication will be centered around video mediums, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the service is ready to completely abandon traditional text as a way to lets user express themselves. Quite the contrary, Facebook keeps adding various features for text messages in hopes of getting people to be more active on the platform.
For this purpose, Facebook latest feature is a new customization option which enables users to change the color of the background for status updates. This colored backgrounds feature was first spotted by TechCrunch and it was later confirmed by Facebook.
The colored backgrounds customization options will allow users to choose from several different colors so that their status update can be complemented by the feeling of the color they have chosen. Users can choose between yellow, red, purple, orange, a number of blue variations and more. Facebook also implemented some more advanced customization options for the feature such as a color gradient, which might seem more appealing than just the flat options.
Unfortunately, the new colored backgrounds feature won’t be available to everyone at the start. Facebook will gradually release them for Android users at first. However, the status updates with color backgrounds posted by Android users can be seen on both the desktop platform as well as on iOS.
The new feature seems to be a way for Facebook to incentivize sharing user-generated content with other users. Earlier this year, an internal report revealed that the sharing of personal Facebook posts and content has gradually declined by 21 percent each year since mid-2015. Instead of personal posts, Facebook users have increasingly shared and posted links to a wide range of external content.
It is surprising to see a new feature for status updates, especially since Facebook has been mainly focused on promoting their Live video feature as well as prioritizing the new format of its News Feed. This lines up with Facebook’s estimates that by 2021, video content will generate around 70 percent of traffic on the platform across all devices.
Depending on how the new colored backgrounds feature is, Facebook may very well start implementing a new feature for text-based communication, instead of focusing all their efforts on video.
Image source: Pixabay
