And just like that, we have yet another reason to open Facebook and then spend a couple of hours on the platform. Facebook is integrating with Weather.com and is putting a full-fledged forecast of what the skies are going to be like when you step out, inside its mobile and web applications
The feature is available under the “More” menu and can provide you with a forecast for the coming week. What’s more, there is a high probability that you have already received it as Facebook says that it has rolled the feature out to the vast majority of its users.
This isn’t exactly Facebook’s first tryst with the weather. Earlier, the company had offered weather greetings in its news feed. The feature was pretty simple and involved a weather update that appeared on your news feed every morning. Facebook appears to be expanding upon that same feature. You get a weather update every morning with a link that can be clicked to get to a full, five day weather update.
Unlike weather applications though, you can only see the weather of a particular location at a time. You can change location and view the weather anywhere, however, doing that will require for you to visit settings first.
You can also set notifications as to when you want to receive weather reports. These features aren’t exactly available widely at present and are limited — however, Facebook says that they will be rolled out near the end of the month.
There are a couple of other tweaks and twists as well — for example, the image accompanying the update changes according to the weather and your location. You can also get the temperature in either Celsius or Fahrenheit as per your convenience.
Upon why this new feature was added to the platform — there are plenty of third party applications after all –Facebook said:
We are doing this because our goal is to develop products that connect people to the things they care about most and create moments of joy in people’s day, like simply telling you that it’s going to rain late.
What wasn’t mentioned, was the fact that such features serve to increase user engagement upon the platform. The company has been launching a bunch of features with an eye upon increasing engagement of late. Whether it is the “Discover People Feature” or the newly added weather update — Facebook is doing all it can to ensure that people find more and more reasons to visit the platform. Once there, it will be up to their own news feeds to keep them engaged.
