Facebook in midst of trying out Snapchat-like feature in Canada

Canadian users will soon be greeted by a camera at the top of their Facebook news feed

Smile! Facebook is testing a change to its mobile app that Canadians noticed at the top of their feeds on Friday. Instead of the usual status bar, Facebook users only in Brazil and Canada were greeted by a live camera, where they could easily post a photo or video.

The test will run for the duration of the Olympics, and there will be visual effects such as frames with “Made in Canada” written on them or Olympic-wreath headbands superimposed on users’ heads.

The feature is reminiscent of Snapchat’s filters. According to Sachin Monga, a product manager at Facebook, many of these features already existed within Facebook as well, but weren’t optimized.

“We had a lot of these things before, like we had a way to take a photograph in Facebook, and we did have a lot of these frames and filters,” Monga explained during a product demonstration this week. “But it was really buried and super-cumbersome. So a lot of the strategy is bringing these things to be a lot more accessible for people, because this is how people want to share right now.”

Snapchat seems to be inspiring copycats; Instagram launched “Stories” this week, which lets people share video and photos that last no more than 24 hours, very similar to Snapchat’s Stories feature.

“Obviously, the shift from text to photos to videos isn’t just happening at Facebook, it’s happening everywhere, Instagram and Snapchat included,” says Monga. “Every single social app needs a composer aspect, and the modern version is centred around a camera. I think it’s as simple as that.”

A Facebook spokesperson pointed out that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about how the company is incorporating more video across the company’s family of apps, with the success of Facebook Live, the company’s livestreaming component, mentioned as an example.

According to Monga, this Canadian test run is going to be iterative — meaning the Olympics will show Facebook how Canadians use the feature, and the company will work to improve the service through user feedback. The service started rolling out to Canadian Facebook users on Friday, and there is a quick how-to process that explains how everything works, so users won’t accidentally post unwanted photos.

Monga says that Canada was chosen as a testing zone because of our active Facebook user base — 22 million Canadians are on Facebook, and 17 million of us use the mobile app.

As well, the Olympic timing works because it’s an event that will see many of us expressing our emotions and reactions to events.

Also changing on your feed: Facebook announced this week that it is once again attempting to crack down on click-bait articles — those with misleading headlines, like “You’ll never believe . . . ”

According to a Bloomberg report, the company has created a new algorithm that better seeks out and automatically determines whether an article is click-bait. Publishers who are found to repeatedly post such content will be punished by having limits on how often their posts are seen on newsfeeds.

Facebook attempted a crackdown two years ago, to little effect.