Facebook Pop-Out Video Panders To Split-Attention

Facebook has quietly added a pop-out video player to the News Feed, allowing users of the social network to keep one eye on playback while still browsing through posts. The feature sees a new button appear in the Facebook video player which, when clicked, detaches it from the post and allows it instead to be dragged around the screen, much in the same way that Samsung and others have supported picture-in-picture playback on smartphones and tablets.

In the case of a Samsung smartphone, of course, the floating videos are intended to allow you to multitask across Android while playback continues. With Facebook trapped in your desktop browser, however, it's not quite so flexible.

Navigate away from the page, in fact, and the video disappears along with the rest of your News Feed.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting way of dealing with the flighty attention-spans of many users. Stopping scrolling just to watch a video might be too great a sacrifice, particularly if there's a pre-roll advert to sit through beforehand.

In the background, meanwhile, Facebook is using attention – not just clicking "Like" – to figure out what people are actually interested in, and thus better shaping the News Feed algorithm.

The new video player option is seemingly being rolled out progressively, so don't be surprised if you don't find it straight away when you next check out Facebook.

VIA The Next Web

SOURCE Facebook