Menlo Park, California – Facebook Inc (Nasdaq: FB) updated its iOS app and now users can find events in 10 major cities by topics such as music, nightlife, food or drinks, community, film and photography, performing arts and sports and fitness. Events can be found by date, location or city.
The company, which has 1.55 billion monthly active users, wrote to the SocialTimes that more and more people are joining and creating events from their mobile phones and the update will help them easily browse and filter for specific events at any given time.
“If there’s a very popular event going on near you, we’ll send you a notification. People who were not friends before, they attend an event, and they start a relationship on Facebook; that’s something we’re tracking pretty closely,” said Aditya Koolwal, a product manager at Facebook.
According to the company, the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens that was released on December 14th, was related to nearly 35,000 Facebook events that compiled more than 2 million invitees and about 660,000 of them will attend the events.
In order to help users from the United States, the Events feature is already available in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Miami, Houston and Washington, D.C. More cities are expected to be added to the list.
“We have a good sense of how people look for things to do. The social signals we have, the friends who are interested in going, the friends you can potentially go with – that’s our bread and butter – so we’re going to try and take advantage of that as much as we possibly can as we roll out more discovery features,” Koolwal said.
The company led by Mark Zuckerberg has been releasing new updates almost every day over the last months. The impact of Facebook in the United States is huge. It is calculated that around 14 times a day, smartphone users open the app.
Transportation features
On Wednesday, it was announced an alliance between Facebook and Uber Technologies Inc, the American international transportation company. Facebook Messenger users living in U.S. cities where Uber is available, can request a Uber ride just by touching an address into the messenger app.
The first transportation network on Facebook Messenger claims 75 percent of the U.S. population lives in a county where Uber is available. Facebook said the two companies want to facilitate transportation arrangements for friends who are texting to each other without having to leave Messenger.
They’ll have two options to do that: either they tap on “transportation from the…” menu or on the address shared by a friend on the app by selecting “request ride.” Moreover, a friend will receive a notification when the other requests a ride from that thread (the same applies to group chats).
Facebook live video
The company announced they will release a new feature that will allow users share live video and collages to make them feel closer to their friends and family. Facebook declared in its newsroom they are going to start testing the new function with a small percentage of people in the U.S. on iPhones.
When the feature becomes available for users, they would tap the Update Status and then Live Video to share a moment in just a few seconds. Users could decide if they want to share the video only with their friends or with the whole word. Descriptions can also be added and people can comment or like
Source: Wired