Facebook Will Now Insert New Updates Into Your News Feed as You Scroll

Facebook has just announced an important change to the News Feed, the heart of your Facebook experience where updates and other posts show up when you log into the social network. Now, as you scroll down your feed, Facebook will insert new stories as and when they pop up, instead of showing you an alert that there are new stories.

The idea is pretty straightforward - when you scroll down the News Feed on mobile, you're only looking at old stories. This change means that instead of having to go to the top of the feed and refresh your list, you'll be able to see new stories while you're scrolling through old ones.This feature will be available only on the Android app as of now, and has started rolling out to select users already.

The obvious implication here is that people will not get stuck seeing only old stories while they scroll, and thus will be more likely to keep using the Facebook app instead of dropping back to the phone's home screen. For many of us, it seems that the News Feed doesn't really change through the day, and this feature will help show you fresh content more easily, and possibly keep you engaged so that other stories you haven't seen also come to the fore.

As mentioned above, the feature has currently been announced only for the Android app – if you don’t have this yet, don’t worry as it’s rolling out to users in batches. There was no timeline given for the iOS version; however Facebook did confirm that this will not be coming to the desktop website.